


Heirloom

by frockbot



Series: Tricksters [5]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Daddy Issues, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death, Persona 3 References, Persona 4 References, Persona 5: The Royal, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, Post-Canon, Therapy, but it's shido so who fucking cares, but they're living together, come for the shido angst stay for the fact that goro's mother loved him very much, furthering the mamakechi agenda, goro cares, ren and akechi's relationship isn't the focus here, ren's mostly around for moral support, the answer is goro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27731095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frockbot/pseuds/frockbot
Summary: In the past few years, Goro Akechi has grown beyond the avenging angel he set out to be as a teenager. He's made real and genuine friendships; solidified his relationship with Ren Amamiya; started therapy; and figured out, more or less, how to cope with his most painful memories. How to look forward toward a future that seems brighter every day.Trust Masayoshi Shido to threaten all that progress by dropping dead.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Series: Tricksters [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765963
Comments: 111
Kudos: 183





	1. the weight of family and the pull of gravity

The first letter arrived several months after Shido’s arrest.

Akechi still had no idea how Shido had found his address. Probably he’d pulled some strings; probably he still had the connections to do that. By then, Akechi had been back in Tokyo for two months, going to university, trying to be normal. Then he pulled a sheaf of sale papers and envelopes out of his mailbox, saw the one from _Masayoshi Shido, #112016, Fuchu Prison_ , and dropped the whole stack like a rattlesnake.

He broke his lease and moved. The second letter arrived two months later, in similar fashion. This time, he paused long enough to examine the envelope, note the postmarks. Shido had mailed the damn thing. He hadn’t had it hand-delivered. Did that mean whoever he’d enlisted to find Akechi didn’t really know where Akechi was?

It didn’t matter. Akechi broke his lease again, found another apartment. And when the third letter arrived, another two months to the day of the second, he snarled, “You have got to be kidding me,” and brought it inside.

 _Dear Goro_ (“Oh my _god_ ,” Akechi spat):

 _I understand that you have changed residences once again. I hope I am not the cause._ (“Of course you’re the cause, you dipshit.”) _I know you have no reason to believe me, but I assure you most sincerely that I mean you no harm._ (“You couldn’t do me any harm if you tried.”) _I wish only to connect with you, father to son._ (Akechi actually, legitimately gagged.)

 _I realize now that my ambition blinded me to the seriousness of the crimes I asked you to commit. Forced you to commit. But you must understand, in my addled state, I thought only of the future of Japan, and what I believed I could accomplish at the helm of it. I did not think about the people I asked you to kill as people, only as obstacles to be destroyed._ (This was nauseatingly familiar logic, and it soured Akechi’s mouth.)

_Still: that does not excuse manipulating you into committing torture and murder._

At this point, Akechi switched to skimming, looking for the words _I’m sorry_ , _I apologize_ , _I was wrong_ …anything to indicate remorse. There was nothing. Plenty of justification: _Please understand, you must know, you have to see_. But no apology.

And then two words that stood out like they’d been written in blood: _Your mother_ —

— _was a remarkable woman when I met her, but she was not at all well. Surely you know that, having lived with her._ (Akechi had no idea what he was talking about. She’d been fine, until she wasn’t.) _Perhaps I should have done more to find you after she vanished, but I believed—apparently foolishly—that she could provide a decent life for you. And if she needed help, she knew where to find me_.

“Why would she have wanted your help,” Akechi breathed, “you _bastard_.”

 _Still, I see now that leaving you in her care was the wrong choice. I should have done more to protect you._ (From her? _From her_?) _I should have done more to guide you. Perhaps, had I taken you under my wing while you were still a child, things could have turned out differently for both of us_.

The characters swam on the page, and with a jolt Akechi realized it was because his hands were shaking. He should have pulped the paper between his fists, shredded it with the nails he still kept so finely manicured; burned it, flushed it down the toilet, fed it to a pigeon.

But he couldn’t.

Instead, stomach clenched with utter loathing, he folded the letter up, stuffed it back in the envelope, tucked the flap inside. Then he put it in the bottom drawer of his desk and left it there.

He didn’t open the other letters when they came, regular as trains, and he never wrote back. He put them all in the drawer, and after a while he stopped feeling anything about them. The sight of Shido’s name in his mailbox ceased to upset him; the stack of paper in the depths of his desk no longer hung like an albatross around his neck. It was a fact of life. What Shido wrote, Akechi kept.

And when he and Ren moved in together, and the first envelope arrived at their shared flat, and Ren pulled it from the pile and held it up and looked at Akechi like he was insane, Akechi just took it and put it in the drawer. And Ren said nothing.

In retrospect, it was a good thing Shido died so soon after that. Otherwise it might have become a problem.

***

[CHATLOG. Akechi to Ahikiko and Naoto, 11/22/XX, 9:38AM]

 **Akihiko** We still on for lunch?

 **Naoto** yes

 **Akechi** Of course. Any preferences?

 **Akihiko** Nah, you pick. You’ve got good taste.

 **Naoto** i agree. anywhere you want to go will be perfect

 **Akechi** You flatter me.  
**Akechi** There’s a hole in the wall I sometimes visit in Harajuku, of all places. I’ll text you the location.  
**Akechi** Is noon still agreeable?

 **Naoto** yes. my meeting should be over by then

 **Akihiko** Same. If I’m running late, I’ll let you know.

 **Akechi** Noon it is.

***

In theory, they were getting together to talk about work. They were all on separate cases at the moment, but both Naoto and Akihiko’s research had brought them to Tokyo, which gave them a good excuse to debrief. …and, if Akechi was honest, to catch up. He liked them, and they seemed to like him, above and beyond what could be expected of colleagues. Akihiko took every opportunity to send him funny things or interesting articles, and Naoto never missed a chance to drop pictures of baby Kano into their group chat. And Akechi…didn’t feel like he contributed much to their conversations, but they kept talking to him anyway.

“Because they _like you_ ,” his therapist, Chuichi, had said. “And why do they like you?”

Because he was intelligent. Insightful. Witty. Passionate. And a host of other adjectives. Chuichi had made Akechi write _a_ _list_ of his positive qualities, and then ask his friends for more. It had been absolutely mortifying.

(But also…gratifying, and sweet, and…everyone had been very kind.)

The diner was truly a hole in the wall: there was only room enough for two cramped booths and a two-stool bar. The floors and walls were tacky with grease, but the food was exceptional. The proprietor was American, and so was the menu: shaved chicken sandwiches, beef burgers, fried potatoes, and shredded cabbage tossed in vinegar and mayonnaise.

“I still haven’t decided what he should call me,” Naoto was saying, dipping the last of his potatoes in the grease from his burger. “ _Ma_ seems easiest, but it also feels…I don’t know.”

“Inadequate?” Akechi suggested.

Naoto nodded. “Yes, that’s a good word for it.”

“There’ve gotta be gender neutral words for this by now, right?” Akihiko said, leaning back in the booth, loosening his tie.

“You’d be surprised.”

“You could make something up.”

“I could. But I worry about what he’ll have to cope with at school. It’ll be difficult enough for him with everyone in Inaba knowing—what I am, and what I’m not.” Naoto fidgeted with his napkin. “Making him call me some strange term would only exacerbate that.”

Akechi’s phone started vibrating. He glanced at it, frowned: he didn’t recognize the number, but the first several digits suggested it was a government line. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I should answer this. Excuse me a moment?”

Naoto nodded, and Akihiko waved him off, so Akechi got up and answered. “Akechi here.”

“ _Goro_ Akechi?” said the clipped masculine voice on the other end.

Akechi tensed. “Yes. To whom am I speaking?”

“Eizo Yamamoto,” the man replied briskly. “I’m with the Correction Bureau. I’m calling to inform you that Masayoshi Shido has died.”

The entire planet shifted on its axis. Not far. But enough for Akechi’s brain to tilt inside his head and spill its contents out his ear.

“You were listed as next of kin,” Eizo continued, light and easy, like he did this every day. Maybe he did. “As such, you are responsible for the cost of cremation and disposition of the cremains.” Akechi’s throat seized, trying to answer, but Eizo overrode him. “The cost was 3.3 million yen, which can be made payable to the Correction Bureau. At that time—”

Akechi hung up.

It was instinctive: he jerked the phone from his ear, hit the red button, and stared at it. Snow had replaced the marrow in his bones, radiating a cold so intense that his joints ached.

“Akechi?” Naoto said.

“What’s wrong?” Akihiko asked.

Akechi turned to face them. They were incomprehensible, a bluish blur and a silver one. “Shido,” he croaked.

And then he jumped, because his phone was ringing again. He flung it onto the table, where it quivered like a slug.

Naoto answered it. “Hello?” he said. “Yes, I’m sorry. A poor connection. …I see.” He produced a notebook, flipped it open, uncapped a pen. “Yes.”

Akechi didn’t see Akihiko move, so he startled badly when Akihiko grasped his shoulders. But Akihiko’s grip was firm, his gaze steely, as he steered Akechi around and back into the booth. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Akechi braced one elbow on the table and rested his forehead in his hand. He could hear his own teeth chattering. Akihiko sat beside him, put his palm between Akechi’s shoulders.

“And if I refuse?” Naoto said. “The cremains, that is. What happens to them? …I see. But the cost…I _see_.”

He’d already filled an entire page with notes. Notes Akechi was going to have to read. To process. To _act on_. Akechi’s skin, already trying to vacate the premises, prickled at the thought.

“Thank you,” Naoto said, like _fuck you_ , and hung up.

“What’s going on?” Akihiko asked.

Naoto told him. Masayoshi Shido had died in custody, in circumstances the Bureau would not disclose. On his intake papers, some four years ago, he had listed Goro Akechi as next of kin, and now the Bureau was pushing the cost of Shido’s cremation onto him. If Akechi refused to pay, he’d face a lawsuit, which Eizo had said he “would almost certainly lose.”

Once the Bureau got their money, they would release the cremains. Akechi could take them, or he could refuse them, at which point they would be “disposed of.”

Akechi was going to be vehemently, violently sick.

“Three million yen,” Akihiko muttered. “That’s…a _lot_ of money.”

Akechi didn’t care about the money.

He should have, because he didn’t have it. PI work didn’t exactly pay well, and with Ren limited by his courseload to only four part time jobs, they weren’t bringing in enough to build any significant savings. They were fine; the bills got paid and there was plenty left over for takeout and movies and whatever else; but there wasn’t _three million yen_ just sitting around waiting to be spent.

But he didn’t care about the money, because he was too busy seesawing between: _Shido had listed him as next of kin_ , and _what the fuck was he going to do with the cremains_?

Next of kin. _Next of kin_. It was laughable; it was insulting. Shido had never acknowledged their familial connection except in those goddamn letters, but he’d told _the government_ that they were related. He’d saddled Akechi with his—his—

What was he going to do?

What was he _supposed_ to do?

Refuse the ashes. Obviously. Pay the fee, mortgage his meager life to finally break the chain binding him to the worst person he’d ever known, and then walk away. Let the Bureau throw the ashes in a dump or tip them into the ocean or whatever the hell they wanted.

But—

 _But_ —

“Hey,” said Akihiko, sharp and clear, cutting through the tumult. “Is Ren home right now?”

Akechi sat up, squinted at him, and understood. Akechi needed to go home, but Akihiko—and Naoto, he confirmed with a glance—didn’t want to leave him there alone. “No,” he replied. “He has class until three o’ clock, and then he works at Rafflesia until later tonight.”

“You could call him,” Naoto said. “I think he’d—”

NO, NO, NO, every muscle in Akechi’s body screamed. Akechi managed not to scream it out loud too. “I don’t want to bother him with this.”

“I think you might have to,” Akihiko said. “Unless you want to rob a bank.”

Akechi coughed a laugh. “You’re right. Well. I don’t want to bother him with it over the phone, then. We’ll discuss it when he gets home.”

“I don’t think you should be alone right now,” Naoto murmured. “You look…upset.”

“I’m quite all right, I assure you.” It was almost true. Faced with their open concern, his brain had packed everything away in the customary mental boxes to be perused never. “It just startled me. He was not an old man. I didn’t expect him to pass away so suddenly.”

Akihiko and Naoto exchanged a look, which Akechi noted with the faintest flutter of irritation.

“He…” Naoto paused.

Akechi tilted his head. “Yes?”

“He was…probably murdered,” Naoto said, slowly, carefully. “But you guessed that, I’m sure.”

Akechi smiled. Did Naoto think he was stupid? Of course Shido had been murdered. Likely by the guards, if the Bureau’s reticence was any indication. “Most certainly.”

“Do you…want to try to find out what happened? We could look into it.”

Oh, joy, another decision to make. Another weed to uproot and stare at: did he want to know the details of his father’s death? Did he want to _seek_ _justice_ for him, when he’d robbed so many people of the right?

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

“C’mon,” Akihiko said, rising. “We’ll drive you home.”

***

They kept needling him on the way back to his apartment. Was he really okay? Was he sure he didn’t want to call anyone? Want _them_ to call anyone? Was Morgana home, at least? What time would Ren be back? (Yes, yes, yes, no, later that night.) By the time Akechi convinced them to leave him be, a headache well on its way to becoming a migraine was pulsing in his temple.

He walked inside, closed the door, stood there. The silence was very loud.

He was shaking again. That was curious. Usually he was better at compartmentalizing than this.

He was shaking _a lot_ , actually. So much so that it might have scared him, if he wasn’t completely numb.

Because the only other times he’d shaken like this were right after he’d shot Ren; right after he’d _been_ shot in Shido’s Palace; and at the rehab center, in those precious seconds between realizing he could fashion a noose out of a belt and deciding not to.

With fumbling fingers, he pulled out his phone, dialed, listened to the _brrrr_ of the dial tone. Then the receptionist, Hiro, said, “Kaito Counseling, how may I help?”

“Hiro-san,” Akechi said. “This is Goro Akechi. I need to see Chuichi right away.”

***

Akechi was a few years out of practice navigating the subway system in a fugue, but muscle memory and instinct took over, piloting him across town to the counseling office in Ginza. In many ways, it was an ordinary medical office, staffed with everything from therapists to psychiatrists to speech language pathologists. Behind the scenes, however, it was underwritten by the Kirijo Group, and every member of staff was or had been affiliated with the, well, _shadowy_ body known as the Shadow Response Unit. The Shadow Operatives.

“After all,” Mitsuru Kirijo had said when she’d handed him their business card, “even secret agents need therapy.”

Hiro looked up when Akechi walked in, and blanched. Huh, Akechi thought. I must look terrible.

“Hello,” Hiro said, already grabbing his phone. “Sit down. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

And, blessedly, when Chuichi appeared in the doorway, the screaming in Akechi’s nerves faded to a dull roar.

He hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect from therapy. As a child, he’d never met a counselor he couldn’t fool, a social worker he couldn’t hoodwink. Before his mother’s death, he’d perfected the art of lying to adults so they wouldn’t cause trouble for her; afterward, he’d become an unparalleled master to ensure his unfettered movement through the world. Shrinks, even the most dedicated ones, had been all too eager to take his smiling lies at face value. The few who hadn’t merely irritated him with their persistence; insulted him by suggesting they understood what he was going through. He hadn’t trusted them then; why should he trust them now?

Naturally, Ren had been convinced that Akechi should go. Akechi generally valued Ren’s opinions, but he hadn’t put much stock in that one, because even Maruki had been a good counselor (according to Ren and the other Thieves) until his delusions got the better of him. Ren couldn’t imagine what it was like to be trapped in a room with somebody who bought your bullshit or, worse, tried to pick apart your brain.

What had swayed Akechi, in the end, was hearing Ren talk about his classes. He was studying to be a psychologist himself, and whenever he bounded home babbling excitedly about a new strategy he’d learned, Akechi was intrigued. To hear him tell it, counselors could be sounding boards, rather than headshrinkers. There to listen, not to pry.

And, well. Akechi had used Ren as a sounding board when they were—call it what it was, when they were _dating_ , that first year they’d known each other. He’d always felt better after they talked. Ren couldn’t be Akechi’s therapist. But if Akechi could find someone similar...

Chuichi fit that bill. Physically, he was nothing like Ren. He’d been muscular once, but time and age had softened his limbs and abdomen into pudding; he was a full head shorter than Akechi, and had to tilt his round face upward to look at him. He wore his hair in a long gray ponytail, occasionally in a braid, and his dark eyes were small and pinched. But, like Ren, he projected an air of open, mild expectation, like of _course_ you’d talk to him about whatever was on your mind, because why not? Also like Ren, he was soft-spoken and contemplative. He spent ninety percent of Akechi’s sessions listening, eight percent asking questions, and two percent assigning homework.

Akechi had known the arrangement was going to work ten minutes into their first meeting. Chuichi had asked him, “What are your goals?” and then listened patiently, never once looking away, not even taking notes, while Akechi vented his spleen all over the carpet. When Akechi was done, Chuichi nodded, took a deep breath, and repeated everything back to him, translated and digested into clear, concise bullet points. He’d _heard him_. He’d asked him a question and genuinely cared about the answer. Akechi was locked in.

Eight months later, Akechi thought he’d made some progress. But now, sitting in the wingback chair in Chuichi’s office, legs tightly crossed so they couldn’t jitter, hands folded in his lap so he couldn’t fidget, he thought, This is it. This is the moment he realizes what he’s gotten himself into.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” he said. His voice sounded distant, even to him. “I appreciate it.”

“It sounded like you were in crisis,” Chuichi said, settling into his desk chair. It groaned.

“Is that what you’d call it?”

“Certainly you were in a bad way.”

Laughter, shrill and hysterical, bubbled up out of Akechi’s chest. He covered his mouth. “I apologize. I don’t know where that came from.”

“What happened?”

Akechi told him. The longer he talked, the tighter his throat constricted, until his voice was scraping at a level that would have set all the dogs in the neighborhood to barking. He resumed shivering, too, violently enough that his spine bowed of its own accord; eventually Chuichi opened his bottom desk drawer, extracted a green velvet blanket, and handed it to him. It smelled like lavender. Probably he’d spritzed it with perfume. Akechi set the bundle on his knees, but Chuichi stared at it until he unfolded it across his lap. It helped.

“So,” Chuichi said once Akechi finally fell silent. “What do you have to do now?”

Akechi’s jaw worked. “Find the money to pay for this. Decide if I want—”

Chuichi held up a finger. “What do you have to do _now_?”

Akechi relaxed. This was a familiar strategy: plotting out a timeline of events, a schedule for himself to follow, so he could focus on individual tasks instead of getting tangled in the enormity of an undertaking.

“Get over the shock,” he said. Thought about it. “Read Naoto’s notes. Figure out if there’s a deadline.”

Chuichi, nodding along, cocked his head when Akechi paused.

“Tell Ren,” Akechi said, very quietly.

“Do you want to write this down?”

He did, and was glad of the suggestion. Taking out his notebook, he wrote the list first, including question-mark steps like “Pick up the ashes??” and “Figure out what happened????” Then, with Chuichi’s help, he reordered the tasks by priority; and then he read Naoto’s notes out loud. They’d given him three weeks to pay up. Once he’d done that, he would have seven days to retrieve the ashes before they were discarded. At maximum, a month.

Next, he turned to his day planner and literally, actually scheduled each step in the process. Occasionally Chuichi gently redirected him: “Maybe you should build in a bit more time for that,” he’d say, or, “Getting that done in a single day might be a tall order.”

His three tasks for today were _Read Naoto’s notes, Figure out the deadline_ , and _Tell Ren_. He slashed triumphantly through the first two, and stared at the third.

“He’s going to hate me,” Akechi said, resenting the admission all the more for its truth. “And he’ll be right. I sh—” The words _should_ and _shouldn’t_ were basically banned in this room, so he cleared his throat and revised: “I think it’s wrong that I’m even considering bringing that bastard’s ashes home.”

“Wrong, how?”

“Shido was a monster.” Chuichi nodded. “He ruined—my mother’s life, Ren’s life, Futaba’s life. _My life_. He’s the reason I’m fucking sitting here, shaking like a shit-dog. Why would I want his cremains? Why would I want a reminder of him on my goddamn shelf?”

“Would accepting his cremains mean you had to bring them home?”

The question opened several doors in Akechi’s brain, and he mentally stalked through each of them in turn, considering his options. “No. Not necessarily. But what else would I do with them?”

“You could spread them somewhere.”

“Ha! Like the doting, devoted son he begged me to be? No thank you.”

He saw Chuichi file that comment away: Akechi hadn’t yet told him about the letters. “You could throw them out.”

“Why bother? Why not let the prison do it?”

“If _you_ did it, then you could be sure it got done. It could be useful, for closure, to hold the urn in your hands and put it in the trash.”

Closure. The word burned in Akechi’s throat. Could you get closure from someone, from some _thing_ , like Shido? He’d been dictating the terms of Akechi’s life since before Akechi was born, including now, from beyond the grave. Hold the urn in his hands, throw it away: was that closure? What was closure, anyway? Feeling better about someone? Forgetting what they’d done to you, forgiving them for it? Shido was dead and Akechi didn’t feel any healthier, any happier. Would taking possession of his ashes really change that?

It was testament to Chuichi’s skill as a therapist that Akechi said all of these things out loud. Chuichi listened with rapt, undivided attention, letting him talk it through.

“Anyway,” Akechi added, circling at last back to his original thought, “my point stands. If Ren knew I was considering taking the cremains, regardless of what I decided to do with them...he wouldn’t understand it. I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense.” He looked up, met Chuichi’s gaze. “Why am I considering it?”

Chuichi drummed his fingers on his desk. “You said he begged you to be a devoted son. What did you mean?”

Akechi started to tremble again. Uncrossing his legs so he could bounce his knee up and down, he said, “He—wrote me—letters. From prison.” Chuichi’s eyebrows rose. “It started—shortly after he was convicted. I still have them.” Akechi swallowed the shame, hot and bitter as tears. “I kept them all. I only read one, but I have them all.”

“How many are there?”

“I don’t know. More than a dozen. He wrote—every few months—for three years.”

“Why didn’t you throw them away?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Akechi whispered. He wanted to snarl, wanted to spit, but the pressure on his chest was too strong, crushing the air from his lungs. His nose prickled, his eyes burned. He had never yet cried in Chuichi’s office and he didn’t want to start now, but he wasn’t sure he’d have the choice. “I hate it. I hate that I kept them, I hate that I wanted them—I—hate it. What does it _mean_? Does it mean I don’t hate him? Why don’t I hate him?” He was remembering something Yusuke Kitagawa, of all people, had said: _You wanted him to love you_. “Is it—natural? Normal? Is it because he’s my father, and deep down I wanted him to care about me?”

Worse: was it because some part of him had actually _liked_ Shido? Admired him? Respected him? Was he so deeply warped that he would cling to someone despicable, yearn for their acceptance and approval? That would be a betrayal of everything he believed. Everyone he loved. Ren. His mother. Other people he liked and respected, people he’d hurt by doing Shido’s bidding instead of simply killing him the moment he got the chance.

His throat was raw by the time he finished dumping all of this at Chuichi’s feet.

Chuichi said, carefully, “I’ve spoken with other clients who desperately craved the approval of a parent. They all had different reasons, but a common factor was that the person they idolized had power. By getting into that person’s good graces, they could take some of that power for themselves.”

“Shido definitely had power,” Akechi said dully. “Over everyone. Over me.”

“Is that how you felt _then,_ or how you feel _now_?”

Akechi stopped, frowned. How had he felt then? He couldn’t remember. So much of his time working with—working _for_ Shido was clouded by stress, by hatred, by... “What’s the difference?”

“Farther removed from a situation, it’s easy to ascribe motivations to ourselves that we didn’t actually feel at the time. And then we punish ourselves unfairly for feeling that way.”

“But—does it matter? Even if I didn’t admire him then—and I’m not saying I didn’t—if I admire him now, and that’s why I want his ashes—isn’t that just as bad?”

“Round and round,” Chuichi murmured, Akechi's cue that he was once again twisting himself into tiny, angry knots. “I think we’d better set a short-term goal. What do you want to work on for the next few weeks?”

Akechi looked down at his planner, studied his own neat handwriting.

“I want to know,” he said quietly, “why I want the ashes. Or why I don’t _not_ want them.”

“And what questions do we need to answer to figure that out?”

“Why I kept the letters,” Akechi said. Chuichi’s pen scritched as he wrote this down. “Although—the letters seem like the ashes. Symbolic of something. Perhaps the answer is the same. ...I need to know if I admired him, on some level. What I wanted from him. What it says about me that I did.”

Chuichi waited, but Akechi said no more.

Turning to his computer, Chuichi pulled up his calendar and hummed. “You have four more sessions between now and the deadline to pick up the cremains. Do you want to schedule some extra ones?”

Akechi shook his head. He had a feeling he’d need those full weeks to recover.

“We probably won’t have an answer before you have to choose, once and for all,” Chuichi warned. “Is that okay?”

Akechi smiled, brittle, painful. “It will have to be.”

“If you don’t know why you want them, will you still take them?”

He’d have to. It would be far worse to let the Bureau dispose of them, only to realize that he wanted them after all.

“Do you have to take them home? Is there a friend you could leave them with, until you’re sure?”

Akechi started to scoff—he didn’t have friends, Ren had friends, to whom Akechi had attached himself like a leech—but made himself stop and think. Everyone had been wildly generous with their praise when he’d asked for it. Ann still occasionally texted out of the blue to remind him of what she considered his best qualities. And several people in the extended group of Persona users had deliberately sought him out, more than once, to talk. Wasn’t that friendship? If not, then what was?

He thought, again, of Yusuke Kitagawa. Of the way Yusuke talked about Ichiryusai Madarame, on the rare occasions that he deigned to speak of him.

“Possibly,” Akechi allowed.

“Then maybe that’s an option,” Chuichi said. “We’ll do our best here, and if we run out of time, you’ll give the cremains to someone until you’re ready to face them properly. You should talk to that friend before you decide for certain, though.”

Nodding, Akechi reopened his planner and considered his schedule. _Message Yusuke_ , he added to tomorrow’s to-do list. “I will.”

“I’ll see you on Friday,” Chuichi said. “Bring the letters with you. I think you’re right: they have a part to play in this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops i'm back on my bullshit


	2. a fight that you were born to lose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **cw:** implied references to suicide

Akechi left Chuichi’s office feeling better. Lighter. He had a plan; he had options; he had at least one person in his corner, albeit paid to be there. He was even able, as he boarded the train, to devote some brainpower to what he wanted to say to Ren.

It was a good thing, really, that Ren worked late that night. Akechi would have a few hours to put himself back together and figure out a script. He liked scripts, he’d discovered. The best way to rationally explain the irrational corkscrewing of his psyche was to write it down first. A few hours would be more than enough time to get that done. He could even practice in the mirror.

Of course it didn’t work out that way.

The moment Akechi walked in the door, Morgana was on him, tail bottlebrush and back arched. “ _There_ you are!” he spat, swatting Akechi’s ankle. “Where have you been? We were worried sick!”

“I wasn’t,” Ren said, rising from the couch.

If Akechi had taken the time to look, he would have seen that Ren was lying. His fists were clenched tight in his pockets, stark against the fabric of his pants; he was whey-faced, drawn, his eyebrows knitted; he scanned Akechi up and down, over and over, as if looking for injuries. Morgana was no better, prowling around Akechi’s shins and fixing him with a feline scowl that could have conveyed concern under different circumstances.

But Akechi was in no place to properly translate their signals. His animal hindbrain, taking advantage of his better self’s shock, seized the wheel and veered hard into _outrage_.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, slamming the door behind him.

Ren made a motion that was really a flinch but which Akechi saw as an irritated flicker. “I live here.”

Akechi sneered at him, uncoiled his scarf, tore it off. “Obviously,” he said, slinging the scarf over the coatrack and starting on his coat. “I meant, what are you doing here _now_? You have class. You have work.”

“I begged off.”

“From _work_? We need that money, Ren.”

“I took a sick day,” Ren replied, frowning. He was building to genuine annoyance now, and all Akechi could think was, _Good_. “I—”

“But what are you doing,” Akechi snapped, flinging his coat onto the rack, “ _here_ , _now_? How did you—” He stopped, and a fresh surge of indignation straightened his spine with a painful snap. “Akihiko. Naoto. They _told you_.”

“Of course they did. They were worried about you.”

Akechi yanked his phone out of his pocket, turned it on, glared at the screen peppered with notifications: from Akihiko, _Sorry, but we didn’t feel right leaving you alone, so_ —; from Naoto, _Ren says he’ll be there soon_ ; from Ren, five messages, the most recent one being, _Please just let me know that you’re okay once you see this_. And from Ann, Haru, Yusuke—

“You told _everyone_?”

“I asked them not to text you,” Ren said, his voice tightening. “I only—”

“And you thought they’d _listen_?”

“I only told them,” Ren continued, doggedly, “because I wanted them to be careful. If the Antisocial Force is active again—”

Scoffing, Akechi stepped around Morgana and stalked further into the room. He wanted to run, wanted to hide, but there weren’t many places to go: their apartment was tiny, not even big enough for a chabudai, and the only truly private place was the bathroom. Even the bedroom, such as it was, was only demarcated by a half wall. They’d hung a curtain over it to try to break up the space a little more, but that wouldn’t shield him from Ren. Not for long, anyway.

“Shido’s goons didn’t have anything to do with this,” Akechi said, glaring at the curtain, hating it. “He was murdered by the guards.”

“How do you know?” Morgana asked.

“Because the Bureau refused to say what happened to him. They were covering their asses.”

“Oh,” Ren said quietly. “Well. That’s a relief.”

“Is it?” Akechi snarled, rounding on him. “Is it a _relief_ , that he was beaten to death by the people who were supposed to protect him, and not by the ones who’ve hated him for years? You would say that. You probably wanted to be the one holding the baton.”

There was a breathless silence. Some part of Akechi, trapped inside the fishbowl of his own churning mind, registered that he’d gone too far. He’d started too far and now he was so far past the line that he couldn’t even see it over his shoulder. That part of him wrenched at the emergency brake, trying to stop, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t in control. For all the work he’d done, all the time he’d spent, all he’d achieved was the crystal clarity that he was hurting someone he cared about, because he was angry, and he couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

Ren was standing very still, looking at him. Not glaring. Just looking. The only sign of the depth of his emotion, beneath the frozen surface, was the redness tinting the tips of his ears.

“You don’t get to talk to me like that,” he said.

That did it. Akechi crashed back to himself, like plunging into icy water; but before he could speak, Ren had sat back down. He put in his earbuds—he’d had them in when Akechi arrived, he always had them in when he was studying, they helped him focus—and pulled his laptop table back into place and returned to whatever he’d been doing. Gaze trained on his screen, pen poised above his notebook. Like nothing had happened.

Like Akechi wasn’t even there.

Akechi looked down at Morgana, who made a very human grimace and jerked his head toward the bedroom. Akechi had the presence of mind to grab his own schoolbag before he followed the cat, his ears ringing.

Morgana hopped lightly onto the bed and flopped down to groom himself, giving Akechi time to settle against the headboard, extract his tablet, toggle to something school-related. His throat was hot and tight.

He’d thought he knew what shame felt like. He hadn’t. He had rarely in his life felt so wrong, and so chastened.

“We were scared for you, you know,” Morgana said eventually. “We thought you’d be here.”

“I went to see Chuichi,” Akechi mumbled. “I didn’t think I had to tell anyone. I thought Ren was busy.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but then you weren’t answering texts either. We thought something might’ve happened to you.”

The venom welled up in Akechi’s throat again. “Like what,” he said, bitterly. “That I’d offed myself, or tried to?”

Morgana blinked at him, eyes wide and baleful. “Or disappeared,” he said. “But mostly we were afraid Shido’s cronies had caught you.”

Akechi looked away, picked up his phone, scrolled through Akihiko and Naoto’s messages. They were contrite, but firm; they’d been concerned about what might happen if he was left alone with his thoughts, so they’d called Ren. Or, well, Naoto had called Ren, with Akihiko’s blessing. They both hoped Akechi would text them once he was feeling better. He wasn’t feeling better, but he texted them anyway: _I understand your concern and I appreciate it._

He thought about reading Ren’s messages next, but guilt spiked through his chest, so he opened the others instead. The Phantom Thieves groupchat was alive with speculation and concern, mostly about him. Ann, Yusuke, Haru, and Sumire had each texted him separately, expressing varying degrees of worry and support. He answered them.

Last in the list were messages from Yu Narukami and Aigis, each careful to note that they’d been tipped off by Naoto and Akihiko, respectively, and offering sympathetic ears if he needed them. He answered them too.

Finally he couldn’t avoid it any longer, and opened Ren’s message thread.

_Hey, I just heard from Naoto. Are you okay?_

_I’m on my way home now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes._

_I’m here, but you’re not. Are you taking a walk?_

_I’ll be here. I’m just studying._

And then the last one, the one Akechi had seen at a glance earlier, sent almost half an hour after the others: _Please just let me know that you’re okay once you see this_. As close to outright panic as Ren ever got. Now, removed from the shock of seeing Ren here, the indignation of having his business aired in public, Akechi could appreciate the picture he’d painted. Could imagine how he would have felt, if Ryuji or someone had texted him something so frightening and then he’d gotten home to find Ren gone. He wouldn’t have stopped at five texts.

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” he muttered. “Either of you. Any of you.”

“I know.” Morgana swished his tail. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Apart from biting Ren’s head off.”

“Yeah, that was pretty shitty.”

Akechi put down his phone. “He’s upset with me.”

“Yup.”

“I should apologize.”

“For sure.”

Akechi scrubbed his face with both hands. “I’ll give him some time to cool off first,” he said, and looked at his bag. Then, decisively, he shoved his tablet back into it, took out his notebook, and set about figuring out what he wanted to say.

The sunlight sleeting through the narrow window was crimson by the time Akechi finished his script. Beside him, Morgana was snoozing. Akechi extracted himself carefully so as not to disturb him and walked out of the bedroom.

The room beyond was empty.

Alarm twanging his heartstrings, he checked the bathroom—empty too—and doubled back to the bedroom to grab his phone. The first notification onscreen was a message from Ren: _Hey, I went to pick up beef bowls. Let me know if you want something else instead_.

Akechi’s gut twisted around the warring responses to this. Irritation at Ren, for not telling him in person; exasperation at himself, for not taking his phone off vibrate. Relief that Ren hadn’t vanished into thin air; gratitude that he was getting dinner, because Akechi’s stomach was empty, and growled to prove it.

And guilt, that Akechi had wounded him so deeply that he couldn’t even speak to him yet.

Ren had only shut down on him like this once before, and Akechi had practically had to crowbar an explanation out of him. Where Akechi reacted to outsized emotions by throwing them at everyone within reach, Ren bundled them away inside himself for later processing. Sometimes they wouldn’t stay put, no matter what he did, and rather than inflict them on other people, he...avoided other people. Akechi hadn’t liked that logic then and he didn’t like it now, but they hadn’t gotten a chance to discuss it and he doubted they would tonight.

At that moment, the front door opened, and Akechi hurtled through the curtain with his heart in his throat. Ren startled, blinking at him, and smiled wryly.

“Hi,” he said, setting the steaming bag on the couch so he could shrug off his coat. “Did you get my text?”

“Just now,” Akechi replied. “Ren—I’m sorry.”

Ren busied himself hanging up his winter things, toeing off his shoes. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m _sorry_. What I said earlier, the way I reacted, it was uncalled for.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Ren picked the bag up again. “It’s been a weird day.”

“Still. I’m sorry.”

Ren nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

 _Okay. Thanks_. Not, _It’s okay_. Not, _I forgive you_. Akechi supposed he would have to accept that, for now.

Akechi joined Ren at the counter and opened a cabinet. This place had good food, but their containers were flimsy; it was usually safer to use their own dishes. He handed Ren a bowl in exchange for a packet of rice and beef, which he decanted into two other dishes, setting aside the smaller portion for Morgana. On cue, the cat appeared from the bedroom, purring, curling around Ren’s legs.

They set Morgana up on Akechi’s desk and sat down together on the couch. Ren queued the next episode of the show they’d been watching, and Akechi did his best to pay attention, but his mind kept sliding away.

 _Tell Ren_. Well, Ren knew. Akechi had a speech to make, and he intended to make it, but he was realizing that he hadn’t factored Ren’s feelings into any of his plans. He hadn’t built in processing time, negotiations, discussions, anything. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that, other than _bad_. A running theme tonight.

They finished eating right as the episode ended. Akechi collected the dishes and washed them while Ren stowed the remainder of the food. It would make a good lunch tomorrow.

“So,” Ren said, once Akechi had shut off the water and dried his hands. “What are we gonna do?”

Akechi frowned at him. “About?”

“The money.” Ren crossed his arms and leaned back against the counter, searching Akechi’s expression. “Three million yen—”

“ _We_ ,” said Akechi carefully, “are not doing anything about the money. _I_ am.”

“How do you figure?”

“He was my father. This is my mess.”

“His mess. He dragged you into it.”

Akechi shrugged. “It’s not for you to worry about,” he said, reaching for his script. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the last vestige of Shido’s hold over my life. Once I’m free of it, we can move forward. But I need your patience while—”

Ren’s eyes were flint. “While you muddle through it all by yourself.”

“Yes. I won’t burden you with it.”

“It’s not a burden if I volunteer.”

“You’re not volunteering,” Akechi snapped, and took a steadying breath. “Are you?”

“That should go without saying.”

Ren was always, always catching him off guard, leaving him flat-footed and annoyed. Now was no exception. “Well. I don’t accept.”

Straightening up, Ren thrust his hands into his pockets. “Why not?”

“Because it’s—” No. He wasn’t going to repeat himself. “I can handle this. I have a plan. Tomorrow, I’ll call the bank—”

Ren stiffened. “You’re going to try to get a loan?”

“How else do you propose I pay for this? Unless you have secret access to Mementos, there’s no way I can raise 3.3 million yen in three weeks.”

“Is that how long we have?” Ren muttered, and added, “You’re going to pay it, period? You don’t want to fight it?”

Akechi stared at him. “Fight it? What, in court? Against _the court_?”

“Sure,” Ren replied, lifting his chin. “We could ask Sae to—”

“Ren, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being—”

“We couldn’t possibly win a case like that,” Akechi said, almost scoffing. “They make far too much profit this way; they’ll never agree to stop. We’d wind up paying millions more in legal fees and still be on the hook for the original cost.” Ren opened his mouth, but Akechi overrode him: “ _No_. It’s better to pay the fee and walk away.”

Ren closed his mouth with a snap. “If you say so,” he said. “But a loan—what bank would loan you that kind of money? What have you got as collateral?”

“You say that like _you_ have anything as collateral.”

“I have an income.”

“Patched together from four different jobs.”

“I have friends who could cosign a loan. Or take the loan out in their name, for us to repay.”

“For _me_ to repay.”

“If you’d let me help, we could—”

“Why can’t you understand,” said Akechi, bristling, “that this is _my responsibility_?”

“There’s no such thing,” Ren retorted. “Not anymore. We share everything or we don’t. That’s what we agreed.”

“We weren’t accounting for Shido when we made that agreement!”

“Yeah, well, we still made it, and I’m holding you to it. I want to help you. I can call banks, I can cosign, I can—”

“No,” Akechi said.

“Akechi! We _live together_. I’m supposed to watch you struggle with this and not do anything?”

“I’m not struggling.”

“Not yet!”

“I’ll be fine.” He could hear his tone getting colder, feel control slipping through his fingers like so much rope. “And if it’s our financial situation you’re worried about, I can assure you, all of the bills will be paid on time.”

Ren flushed. “That hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

“Perhaps it should have. Perhaps it should have been the first thing across your mind, before infantilizing me.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“I will find a way to pay for this,” Akechi said, stark, final, “even if I have to ask the Bureau to place me on a payment plan. It will not affect anything about our situation or our budget. I have enough wiggle room in my own income that I can absorb—”

“I want—”

“I do not,” Akechi said. “You’ll simply have to find a way to accept that.”

Ren huffed out a breath, his shoulders tense, his lips thin. Morgana, watching from the back of the couch, shot Akechi a pointed look. Akechi ignored him.

“However. There is one other aspect of this that I would like your opinion on,” Akechi added, with effort, because his own voice was failing, trying to protect him from the judgement he knew was coming.

He watched Ren roll his shoulders back, exhale, loosen the death grip in his pockets. “What?”

“The Bureau has given me the option of taking Shido’s cremains.” Being able to disengage from himself was at least useful in situations like this, allowing him to float loose inside his own skull. “Once I’ve paid the fee, I’ll have one week to go and pick them up before they’re thrown away.”

“So?” Morgana said, before Ren could answer.

“So,” Akechi said, turning to the cat, grateful for the diversion, “I need to decide if I want to accept them or not.”

Morgana’s furry jaw dropped. “You—why would you want them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you hate Shido? Why would you—” Morgana stopped, wrinkled his nose. “Would you bring them _here_?”

“Possibly,” Akechi said. Ren’s stare scalded the side of his face. “That is what I have to decide.”

“But—” Morgana looked at Ren. “I—”

Akechi looked too, at last, and his stomach clenched. Ren was even better at detaching than Akechi was. At a moment’s notice, he could go smooth and placid as a saltwater lake, impenetrable at the surface and hundreds of fathoms deep. So he was now: removed, watchful, apparently languid and relaxed but really a giant question mark.

“I can’t make that call for you,” Ren said.

“Well,” Akechi said, “what do you think I should do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t _know_ , Ren. This is the problem.”

“Are you going to talk to Chuichi about it?”

“Of course. But as you pointed out, we live together. You should have a say in whether or not I—”

“He was your father,” Ren murmured, “not mine.”

It probably wasn’t a barb thrown back in Akechi’s face, but it stung anyway. “So what? You didn’t like him either. I can’t ask you to accept—”

“And I can’t ask you to throw away _your father’s_ _ashes_ if you decide you want them.”

“But he was terrible,” Morgana put in. “The worst! You shouldn’t want them at all!”

“There’s no should or shouldn’t, Morgana,” Ren said.

“But he’s not wrong,” Akechi said. He almost felt like he had to shout to be heard; Ren seemed miles away, the space between them fraught and fractured. “What would I even do with them? Put them on the desk to stare at us? Stick them on top of the fridge?”

“Spread them,” Ren said, mild and amenable. “Maybe in a place he liked—”

“On a cruise ship, out to sea?” Akechi said, barking a laugh. “He doesn’t deserve that. He deserves the dump. He deserves to be forgotten.”

“Do you want to forget him?”

“I don’t know what I want! What do _you_ want? Would it bother you? Would it hurt you? Do you think I should forget him?”

Ren shook his head. “I don’t think,” he said, “anything.”

As a child, Akechi’s favorite summertime treat had been kakigori. Shaved ice flavored with syrup, bought from street vendors on the way to the konbini, shared between him and his mother. Once, he’d been eating too fast, and he’d swallowed a substantial piece of ice whole. He still remembered how the strange, clutching cold had slid down his throat, seemed to stick in his stomach. How it had lingered long after the ice would realistically have melted to water.

He felt it again, now, except that the ice spread all the way down his limbs, covering him with frost.

“You have no opinion,” Akechi said, flat. “None whatsoever.”

“I don’t want to talk you into anything.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking—”

“Anything I said,” Ren interrupted, clipped, firm, “would influence your decision. I don’t want to do that.”

“ _I_ want you to.”

“No. I’m not going to be the reason you choose either way.”

Akechi expected to snap, expected the rage to come tearing out of him in a spray of blood. Instead, it settled heavy and frigid in his chest, crystalline around his heart.

“I see,” he said. “So that’s how it is.”

Morgana looked at each of them, and sighed, and said, “You guys are hopeless.”

***

“One moment,” Yusuke said. “You moved.”

Akechi was sitting in Yusuke, Ryuji, and Ann’s living room, surrounded by half-finished canvases and boxes of art supplies. He was there to discuss Shido, but as soon as he’d arrived, Yusuke had perched him on a box and handed him a fine ceramic pitcher. It was tall and slender, with a spout that curved like a swan’s throat; its white surface was covered in purple, orange, and red flowers, each gleaming with a heart of fire. Yusuke had extended Akechi’s left arm, closed his hand around the pitcher’s neck, and tilted it _just_ enough that it caught the golden beam of sunlight lancing through the blackout curtains.

“Be still,” Yusuke had instructed, taking up his pencil, and he’d bent toward his canvas like a plant toward the sun.

That was twenty minutes ago. Now, Akechi said, “I did not move.”

“You did.” Leaning forward, Yusuke closed his index finger and thumb gently around the pitcher and quirked it upward. Akechi saw the tendons in Yusuke’s wrist flex, but felt no difference in his own. “There. Now please, sit still.”

Akechi rolled his eyes and huffed and would have flounced, too, if he hadn’t been expressly forbidden from doing so.

It was actually strangely soothing, posing. From this angle, he couldn’t quite see Yusuke’s face, so he didn’t have to worry that he was being judged while he talked: about Shido, about the money, about the impossible task of finding a loan. He’d spoken to three banks in three days and been soundly rejected by each one. He still had a few more options on his list, but after that, he wasn’t sure what he would do. And Ren...kept offering to help with the money, but was no help at all with the ashes.

“Madarame is still alive, yes?” Akechi asked.

“He is,” Yusuke said, without the slightest indication whether this was a painful subject. “He seems well.”

“You’ve met with him?”

“Only once, at his request. He wished to apologize to me. He said that expressing remorse—along with dividing his riches among the students he wronged—was the best way he could think of to atone for his actions.”

Akechi snorted. “And what do you think about that?”

Yusuke paused, erased something, redrew it. “I appreciated it,” he replied. “He expressed a great deal of remorse immediately after his change of heart, of course, but that never seemed genuine. It was...gratifying to hear a personalized apology. Did Shido ever reach out to you?”

Akechi’s fingers tightened on the pitcher. He forced himself to relax, to breathe through the knot suddenly squeezing his abdomen. “He...did. He wrote me letters.”

“Ah! You kept up a correspondence?”

“No. I never wrote back. His letters weren’t...” Akechi sighed through his nose. “I don’t believe Shido was ever truly sorry for what he did.”

Yusuke stopped and looked at him, openly sorrowful. “I’m so sorry, Akechi.”

Flushing, Akechi ducked his head. “It’s fine. Just another exciting aspect of this whole mess.”

“Please be careful not to move.”

“I apologize.” Clearing his throat, Akechi examined the pitcher, tracing the fine swoop of the handle with his gaze. “I’ve talked a lot about the money, but honestly, that isn’t the worst part.”

“Then what is?”

Ryuji’s bedroom door opened. Ryuji stumbled out of it, scratching his ass, and waved vaguely at them on his way into the bathroom. Akechi waited until the door shut behind him before he spoke again.

“The cremains,” he said. “I feel...strange…leaving them in the Correction Bureau’s possession. Letting them be _disposed of_. Yet I don’t know what to do with them otherwise.”

“Hmm.” Yusuke tapped his chin with his pencil. “You could have them cast in glass. A pendant, perhaps, to keep close to your heart—”

Akechi made a face. “I don’t think I want Shido anywhere near my heart.”

“There are plenty of possibilities besides. You could mix them into concrete or clay and fashion them into a statue. You could add them to paint. An acrylic pour featuring liquid charcoal and human ash—the aesthetic would be quite striking.” His pencil tapped faster, his unfocused eyes glittering. “The bone fragments would be problematic. You’d have to layer the paint quite thickly to ensure they didn’t flake off. Or cover the whole thing in glaze...”

Ryuji came out of the bathroom and padded into the kitchen, bare soles slapping wetly on the tile.

“So you don’t think it’s odd,” Akechi said slowly, “that I might want them at all.”

“Certainly not! Think of the potential! In fact I would be appalled if you wasted the opportunity to—”

“What if I didn’t want to use them for _art_?” Akechi said. In the kitchen, the fridge opened and closed. The microwave started to hum. “What if I...wanted to put them on my mantel?”

“Do you have a mantel?”

“No. But I might someday.”

Yusuke cocked his head. “Do you want to display them?”

“I don’t know,” Akechi grumbled, rubbing his forehead. Then he stiffened. “Oh. I moved. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Yusuke said, waving him off. “I’m finished.”

Akechi’s jaw dropped. “You’re _finished_? But—”

“I simply wanted a sketch,” Yusuke said. Getting up, he plucked the pitcher from Akechi’s grasp and set it on the ratty sofa, where it would no doubt remain until Ryuji broke it. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“You’re welcome.” Akechi caught his breath. “I don’t know what I want to do with the ashes, but I don’t want to leave it up to the Bureau. Ren refuses to have an opinion.” He heard a distant scoff from Ryuji, chose to ignore it. “I don’t want to keep them at home while I decide on the best course of action.”

Ryuji wandered in clutching a steaming bowl of ramen.

“I wondered,” Akechi said, “if you might keep them here for me.”

“Dude, _what_ ,” said Ryuji, at the same moment that Yusuke said, “Why, of course.”

They looked at each other, Yusuke blinking, Ryuji goggling.

“What?” Ryuji repeated. “No way, man! I don’t want that guy’s urn in my house!”

“This isn’t a house,” Yusuke said, eyebrows knitting. “It’s an apartment.”

“You know what I mean! How’m I supposed to sleep with Shido’s ghost runnin’ around?”

“I don’t think Shido has a ghost,” Yusuke said. “I don’t think ghosts exist.”

“Are you kiddin’ me? How many times do we have to fight real, actual demons before you—”

“Shadows aren’t demons.”

“I was asking Yusuke,” said Akechi coldly, “not you.”

Ryuji rounded on him. “Hey, I live here,” he snapped, “and I get to have a say on what’s in my space!”

“I could keep it in my room,” said Yusuke. “Besides, there’s nothing to be concerned about. It’s only dust.”

“It’s _his_ dust! What do you even want it for?” Ryuji demanded of Akechi. “What’re you gonna do, put up an altar?”

“No,” Akechi spat. “Of course not.”

“Then what the hell?”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

Flumping onto the sofa, Ryuji dropped his bowl on the side table so roughly that broth sloshed over the edge. “No, right, I forgot,” he said. “Mr. Mystery Man over here. Talk about fuckin’ ghosts.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you think you’re so good at hiding what’s goin’ on in your head, but you’re not! You’re so obvious, dude. You spent all that time yellin’ about how much you hated Shido, but I don’t think you even know what hate _is_. You sure as shit didn’t hate Ren!” Indignation flared hot up one side of Akechi’s body and down the other. “All this dad stuff is complicated, right? But some of us _actually_ hate that guy’s guts for what he did. Some of us don’t want the reminder.”

“Are you talking,” Akechi said, balling his trembling hands into fists, “about anyone in particular.”

“Yeah, man!” Ryuji snarled. “ _Ren_! Jesus, did you forget what your dad did to him?”

“I have not forgotten.”

“I’m not even talkin’ about what happened in Inaba! You weren’t there after they got to him,” Ryuji said, like Akechi hadn’t spoken. A frozen needle slid between Akechi’s ribs, into his lung. “You think you had it bad, pretending to shoot him—they beat the _shit_ out of him that night. He was fucked up for _days_. An’ every time he heard Shido’s voice or saw his face it was like he was back there again. He acted like he was okay, but I could tell. We could all tell.”

In another life, at another time, when Akechi’s breath wasn’t stalled in his chest, he might have appreciated the look in Ryuji’s eyes: the secondhand pain, the seething indignation.

“An’ now you wanna set Shido up in _his place_ , make him think about it all the time, every day, where he’s supposed to be safe?”

“No,” Akechi said, low and level for all that he was shaking uncontrollably. “Of course not. This is why I tried to talk to Ren about—”

“So it can be _his_ fault if you throw ‘em away and then decide you wanted ‘em later? So you can have somethin’ else to blame him for?”

The blistering cold in Akechi’s chest snaked downward, curling around his stomach. “You’ve talked to Ren about this.”

“Uh, _yeah_ ,” Ryuji said, like Akechi was stupid, like it was obvious. Maybe it should have been. “He’s my _best friend_.”

“He’ll talk to _you_ , but not to—” Akechi broke off. Stood up. “I’ve overstayed my welcome. I apologize. Excuse me.”

And he left. Autopiloted into the hallway, down the stairs, onto the sidewalk. Pointed himself toward the train station. Sat on the platform, knee jiggling, hands clasped, waiting.

“Akechi-kun?”

He sat bolt upright and looked around, relaxing only a fraction when he saw Sae Niijima standing there. Her long silver hair was drawn into a clip at the back of her head, her bangs draped over one eye. She was wearing a gray pantsuit in her trademark style, albeit with visibly cheaper fabric than before.

She tilted her head, raised her eyebrows.

“Sae-san,” Akechi said. “It’s been a while.”

More than a while. They’d bumped into each other at Leblanc a few times, and she’d invited him out for sushi once, but otherwise he avoided her. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He avoided her, because she was a vivid reminder of everything that had transpired the year they’d worked together. Everything he’d done to the people he now considered his friends.

“It has,” Sae agreed. “Are you heading home?”

“Yes.”

“The thing is,” Sae said, glancing at the route poster above them, “Makoto tells me you’re living in Hachioji now, and that’s not anywhere on this line.”

Akechi followed her gaze, frowning, and understood. He’d been heading toward his old apartment. Sighing, he levered himself up.

“Good catch,” he said. “I must have been distracted. I was going to my previous apartment by mistake.”

“You’ve been living with Ren for a while now, haven’t you?”

“A very short while. I lived at that other residence for longer.”

“Hm.” Sae’s lips compressed. “There’s a café I like not far from here. Come with me.”

It wasn’t a request. Akechi bristled. “I really—”

But she was already walking, her low heels crisp on the concrete. Almost despite himself, Akechi followed.

The café in question was practically a carbon copy of Leblanc. Akechi had visited enough coffee shops in Tokyo to know how common this was, how many quasi-Leblancs dotted the city. Trust Sae to seek them out like a hound to vomit. At least this one wasn’t staffed by the vulnerable caretaker of a depressed fifteen-year-old girl—

That was uncharitable. Sae had not been in her right mind. Certainly Akechi hadn’t either.

“Two coffees,” Sae told the proprietor, setting her bag down in a booth. “House blend, black.”

Akechi sat across from her. She folded her hands on the table and studied him. Assessed him.

“How have you been, Sae-san?” Akechi asked.

“Cut the crap,” Sae said, brusque but not unkind. “I heard about Shido and I know you’re not taking it well.” Akechi blushed. “I hate to think what would’ve happened if I hadn’t spoken to you today.”

“I would have arrived at my old apartment, turned around, and gone back home.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you would have done something worse.”

“What on earth makes you think that?”

“When I switched to the other side of the courtroom,” Sae said, “one of the biggest adjustments was re-learning how to read people. As a prosecutor, I only had to worry about what people could tell me. Their feelings didn’t matter, especially once they were out of my sight. But as an attorney, my clients’ mental state matters very much. There’s no point getting justice for a corpse.” She paused, thought about this. “Unless that’s what my client wants. But you know what I mean.”

Akechi’s throat was tight. “I am not suicidal.”

The proprietor brought over their drinks. Without breaking eye contact, Sae picked hers up, sipped it, and set it back down.

“Not yet,” she said. “Are you in therapy?”

“Yes. I’m seeing my therapist tomorrow.”

“Good. That’s good. That will help.”

“Respectfully,” Akechi said, leaning back, crossing his arms, “what do you know about what’s going on in my head? You say you have experience because of your clients, but have you ever actually felt the way I feel?” Sae opened her mouth, but he cut her off: “No. You can’t possibly understand the pressure I’m under. You’ve never understood.”

Something flickered behind her expression. She looked down, into her cup.

“I regret that,” she said quietly. “I never told you, but I regret it. I regret so much about that time in my life, but especially that I never noticed how close you were to the brink.”

Akechi’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He forced his jaws apart, said, “I was a very good actor.”

“You were seventeen,” she said, glancing at him. “Barely eighteen.”

“An adult.”

“No. _I_ was an adult, and I should have seen what was happening. I couldn’t have understood the extent of it, since I didn’t know about the Metaverse, but I could have stopped the department from exploiting you, at least.”

Akechi turned his face away, toward the wall. “I wanted to be exploited. It was part of the plan.”

There was a pause. Then Sae said, “Would you like to talk about it? The pressure.”

Akechi’s fingers hurt where they dug into his elbow. “Not particularly.”

“Not with me,” she translated, ever the litigator. “I see. Then with who?”

With Ren, but Ren wouldn’t let him. He refused to tell Akechi how he felt, and now Akechi knew why. He’d always known, really, but he’d preferred not to think about it, preferred to chafe at the unfairness of Ren clamming up right when Akechi most needed his input. Ren’s opinion was obvious, and correct: Shido didn’t belong in their life, dead or living, and Akechi was monstrous for even considering putting him there. Monstrous and inconsiderate and desperately, desperately cruel, for not acknowledging the toll it would take on Ren’s psyche. It said something about Akechi—something bad—that he was still conflicted, even now that he knew how much it would hurt Ren.

Akechi had told Chuichi that Ren would hate him for this, but the reality was worse. Ren was going to hollow himself out, shave off his sharp edges, in service of whatever Akechi decided. And then he was going to sit with that, and resent it, and resent Akechi, until there was too much bad blood between them to be borne. And then he was going to leave.

“My goodness,” said Sae dryly, startling him. He hadn’t meant to say any of that out loud, but her expression told him that he had. “Is that all?”

“Don’t mock me. You don’t know him like I do.”

“You might be surprised what I know. I’ll admit that all of that sounds plausible enough. But it seems equally likely that Ren is simply withholding his opinion _for now_ , so as not to influence you one way or the other. Then, once you’ve made your choice, he’ll negotiate the best terms for himself.”

Akechi stared at her. A thousand dominoes were toppling inside his head, cascading toward an inevitable conclusion.

“That,” he said, and sagged. He lowered his hands to his lap, his gaze to his coffee, as yet untouched. A sparkling, shining relief, like starlight, flowed through him. “That…would make sense.”

“You see?” Sae took another sip. “It’s all about perspective.”

It was too much to think about right now; too many possibilities to untangle. Akechi sat up straight.

“What would you do?” he said. “If you were me.”

Sae frowned into her cup, running her finger along the edge. Akechi listened to the faint clink of plates being scrubbed, the hiss of a simmering pan somewhere out of sight.

“My father was not a corrupt political kingpin,” Sae murmured. “Nor was he a misogynist, or a narcissist. But he was strict, and harsh, and exacting in his standards. If Makoto thinks living with me during my distortion was difficult…” Sae snorted. “She doesn’t remember. She was a child, and he was always kinder to her than to me. Even now, she thinks I dislike him because he threw his life away. She’s not entirely wrong. He shouldn’t have thrown his life away; he shouldn’t have dedicated all his time to his job and left me to care for my younger sister; he shouldn’t have demanded perfection from me and shamed me when he didn’t get it.”

She looked at Akechi, and her eyes were hard as gemstone. “And he shouldn’t have used intimidation and violence against his suspects and witnesses. After I was hired by the department, I looked up his police record, trying to convince myself that he had been a good officer, if not a good father. He was not. He threatened people’s livelihoods. Their families. He beat them and drugged them and extracted confessions by any means necessary.

“And Makoto…she loved him. She was crushed when he died. She’s going to be a police officer based on his example.” Sae’s nails clicked against the side of her mug. “What would I do? What _did_ I do. I let her think what she needed to think. When she moved out, I let her take his urn, so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. I kept his secrets to protect my sister. Is there someone you need to protect?”

“From Shido?”

“From the truth of what he was.”

“No.” Akechi shook his head slowly. “No one is under any illusions about what he was. Least of all myself.”

“Then I think you should take them,” Sae said, “and throw them in an alley. Let the rats have him.”

It was not a bad idea.

“Thank you, Sae,” Akechi said, picking up his cup. “I appreciate your candor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when I set out to write this note originally I was gonna be like “sae is just miles edgeworth now lol” but like, she really is? so it’s not a joke anymore. sae is miles edgeworth.


	3. a million choices, though little on their own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **cw:** references to suicide, depression

“Dear Goro,” Chuichi read. “I hope that, even though you have not returned any of my letters, you are at least receiving them, and reading them. Certainly I hope I am not sending them to some poor, confused stranger, although none of them have been returned, so I have to assume you are there.

“In my previous letter, I asked if you had entirely given up the life of a detective. I haven’t seen you on television of late, so I have to imagine you’ve stepped out of the spotlight. But detective work suits you. You have a sharp mind. It reminds me of myself—”

“You _would_ say that,” Akechi spat, “you cretin.”

Chuichi snickered. They were sitting together in his office, Akechi once again in the wingback chair, his notebook open on his lap; and Chuichi behind his desk, with two piles of letters in front of him. The ones on the left were still in their envelopes; the ones on the right were opened. Chuichi had been reading them out loud, selecting them at random from the unopened pile.

This latest, the seventh of the day, was from two and a half years ago. Akechi thought he remembered getting it: he’d discovered the envelope after spending nearly two full weeks with Ren. Into the drawer it went, and now out it came.

“That’s another tally in the _You’re just like me_ column,” Chuichi said, scanning the rest of the page. “He talks at length about how he once thought he would be a detective, too.”

“Of course he did,” Akechi muttered, marking his notebook.

They had several columns running. _You’re just like me_ was the busiest, followed closely by _And your mother was a whore_ (Akechi’s words, not Chuichi’s). _Excuses for his inexcusable behavior_ came in at a close third. (Akechi had wanted to call that one _Bullshit_ , but Chuichi had made him be more specific.)

Akechi added, “I’m sure he experienced some great upheaval that dashed his hopes in that regard.”

“How’d you guess?”

“Ugh, does he say that?” Akechi wrinkled his nose and added a tally to _Excuses_. “How predictable. He can’t even lie well.”

“For all we know, it’s not a lie. But it doesn’t justify his actions.” Chuichi flipped the paper over. “Ah, and here’s Aiku, as always. Should I read it?”

“Don’t bother. I can guess. _Your mother was a disappointment to humanity, she stank of rotten fish, I should have dumped her body in a canal and spirited you away to live with me_.”

“In so many words,” Chuichi said, folding the letter and adding it to the discard pile. “He was remarkably consistent over the years.”

Akechi curled his lip. “Consistent, hah. _In_ sistent, more like.”

“It’s interesting to me that he never has anything new to say, even in the more recent letters.” Chuichi flipped through the opened letters, picked one up. “Like this one. He sent this just a few months ago, but he’s still singing the same songs.”

“I assume he would have changed his tune if I’d actually answered him.”

“Why do you think he never stopped writing?”

Akechi drummed his fingers on his notebook. “He wanted a reply.”

“What reply? What did he want from you?”

“I don’t know.” Akechi frowned at the remaining envelopes. “Forgiveness? But he never asks for it. In fact he spends most of his time trying to convince me he doesn’t need it. Attention? I was probably the only person in the world who would have listened to him.”

“You didn’t listen to him,” Chuichi pointed out. “You only read one letter.”

“Still.” Akechi dropped his gaze to the notebook, scowled at the black marks crisscrossing the page. “Affection, perhaps. He wanted me to believe he was a good person. He wanted me to sympathize with him.”

“And he wanted you to hate Aiku,” Chuichi said. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, why bother? Why not forget about you?”

Because, on some level, he had cared about Akechi as a person? Because once the distortion in his heart was gone, he was finally able to see what a rotten father he’d been? But Akechi didn’t have to say that out loud to know it wasn’t true. Shido had practically said it himself, over and over. None of these letters were about Akechi. They were about Shido.

Why, indeed?

After a moment, Chuichi picked up the sheaf of creased paper and tapped it into a neater stack. “Might I venture a guess?”

Akechi blinked. “Sure.”

“From what you’ve told me,” Chuichi said, “your father was obsessed with his public image. He thought he needed a spotless reputation to succeed in politics. But once he was arrested—” Chuichi glanced at Akechi, and Akechi was startled by the keen, shrewd edge to his gaze—“the image he’d so carefully cultivated was destroyed. Everyone saw him as a scheming, soulless politician. And in prison, he was in no position to counter that narrative.”

 _I have to imagine that you’ve stepped out of the spotlight_.

An electric shock straightened Akechi’s spine, drew his shoulders back.

“ _But I was_ ,” he breathed.

Chuichi nodded slowly. “You weren’t ever implicated in the conspiracy. If you decided to go back to being a celebrity, you’d still have influence. Power. Power he needed.”

“ _God_ ,” Akechi said, dragging both hands through his hair. He could see it now, clearly, the logic marked out in bright red lines. “Because changing someone’s heart doesn’t change who they _are_. He was a narcissistic fuckwit, and he needed someone to defend him—to say he’d made a terrible mistake—”

“And the best way to get you to do that,” Chuichi concluded, “was to get you back on his side.”

Akechi shot to his feet so fast that the room blurred. “I was never on his side,” he snarled, slamming both hands on the desk. Chuichi didn’t flinch. “ _Never_. It was _always_ about bringing him down. I never once—”

“I know,” Chuichi said. “But he didn’t.”

Suddenly, Akechi’s knees were jelly. He slumped back down, put his face in his hands, took a deep breath.

“He would never have publicly acknowledged our connection,” Akechi said. A tremendous shudder clanged his molars together. “But if _I_ acknowledged it—if the pure and innocent Detective Prince defended his tragic father—he could ride my coattails to public sympathy. He could use me. Again.”

“This is only speculation, of course.”

Akechi barked a laugh, then a second one, then subsided into a grim, rumbling chuckle. “ _Speculation_. No. It makes perfect sense. That’s why he never gave up.” Akechi lifted his head, glowered at the unread letters. “His legacy was at stake. He was always determined to preserve his legacy.”

“It also explains the excuses,” Chuichi said. “And the comparisons between the two of you. He probably thought he was complimenting you. Buttering you up.” Akechi wanted to spit. “Does it explain why he kept insulting your mother, too?”

“Of course it does.” Akechi dropped his forehead back into his palms, dug his nails into his scalp. The thought of that man huddled in his cell, coming up with new and exciting ways to slander Aiku, made Akechi’s stomach churn. “He had to tear her down so he would look better by comparison. He had to lie and lie and lie so I would hate her and love him.”

“I wonder if he knew how old you were when she died,” Chuichi murmured. “I wonder if he realized how much you remember about her.”

Akechi’s fingers flexed compulsively, tangling into his hair, pulling so hard that tears sprang to his eyes. No. Shido couldn’t possibly have known what Akechi remembered of Aiku. The woman Shido had described in his letters—unreliable, erratic, cold—was a stranger to him. Even at the end, when she’d been so ill that she went straight from bed to work and back again, when Akechi couldn’t get her to eat, when he huddled with her under her blanket and watched her sleep, worry gnawing in his gut—even then, he’d known she loved him. He couldn’t understand it, but he’d known. He’d made himself forget, to spare himself the pain.

How _dare_ Shido try to take that away from him again.

There was a soft tap, and Akechi looked up. Chuichi had set a box of tissues in front of him. Akechi grabbed a handful and pushed them against his eyes, exhaling shakily.

“But even now, I can’t let the Bureau throw out his remains,” Akechi mumbled. “I have to take them.”

“You _have_ to, or you _want_ to?”

Akechi could feel something inside him shifting, a drawer opening in his heart. “I have to,” he said. “I have to hold them in my hands. I don’t know what I’ll do with them afterward, but I can’t...I have to take them.”

“That seems like an important distinction.”

Akechi blew his nose, cast about, dropped the bundle into the wastebasket. “I suppose it is.”

“I think there’s something here,” Chuichi said, tapping the desk. “Not in the letters, necessarily, though we can keep reading them if you want to.”

Akechi looked at them. Leaned forward, gathered them up, and deposited the lot in the wastebasket too. Resumed his seat, blew his nose again.

“I think,” Chuichi continued, “we need to talk about your mother.”

Panic fluttered like a trapped moth in Akechi’s throat. “We have.”

“We talked about what happened to her. We talked about how you feel about her, and how you feel about what happened.” Chuichi lowered his chin, looked at Akechi from underneath his eyebrows. “But we’ve never talked about her in the context of your father.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. He killed her. He raped her, and then he made her life a living hell until she died. That’s the reason—that’s why—” Akechi gulped a breath, twisted his fingers together, hard knuckles biting cold flesh. Wished he was wearing gloves. “Everything in my life, everything—”

“Everything in your life hinges on your perception,” Chuichi said, nodding, “that Shido took Aiku’s future away from her. I don’t think you’re wrong.”

“Then what—”

“I just wonder if it’s that simple. If someone’s life can be boiled down to what one other person did to them.”

“Of course it can,” Akechi said. “Mine can.”

Chuichi cocked his head, glanced past Akechi at the clock on the wall. “We don’t _have_ to talk about anything you don’t want to, Akechi; these are your sessions. But I have some questions about Aiku and Shido that I’d like to ask you next time. Should I email them to you, so you can consider them in advance?”

Consider them in advance, alone? At least here, in this office, he was safe; at least here he could break down and bear up and break down again without judgement, and without scaring anyone who loved him.

Akechi breathed in, two, three, four; out, two, three, four. And again. And again. Until his hands were still, his shoulders relaxed, and the sheer terror that always welled within him when Chuichi mentioned Aiku was locked away again.

“No,” Akechi said. “No, thank you. I’d rather discuss them together, next time.”

Chuichi nodded. “All right. Again, if you decide you don’t want to talk about her, I’ll understand.”

Akechi swallowed, his throat scraping like sandpaper. “I’ll be sure to tell you if that’s the case.”

“Then I’ll see you next week. Oh, and don’t forget your homework.”

***

His homework was: give Ren something to do.

Which was a tall order. Akechi mulled it over on the train ride home, hands clasped tight around his knees. He had tried, he’d pointed out to Chuichi, to ask for Ren’s advice, and been rebuffed. (Although after talking to Sae, he wasn’t so sore about that anymore.) Ren had offered to help him get a loan, but Akechi didn’t want to burden him financially. Yusuke was going to store the ashes until Akechi figured out what to do with them. What else was there?

His phone vibrated. He took it out, switched it on.

It was a new email from Sae:

_Akechi-kun,_

_As promised, here is the list of aid funds that may be able to help you pay the cremation fee. I’m sorry I didn’t send them sooner; I wanted to make sure they were all still active and would consider your request._

_I hope you are well,_

_Sae Niijima_

Attached was a list of non-profits. No email addresses. Just telephone numbers.

Akechi was so sick of calling people.

He was sick of talking to bankers who all but laughed at him when he explained his financial situation. He was sick of curt denials that reminded him he had nothing to offer and everything to lose. He was sick of being made to feel weak and small because he needed money and had no way to get it. And he was sick, in advance, already, of flaying open his heart and pouring its contents into a stranger’s ear so they could nod and smile and say, “I’m sorry, but we can’t help you.”

Akechi leaned his head against the rattling window, closed his eyes. He hadn’t felt this tired in a long time. It was an exhaustion that compelled him not to sleep, but to lie still with his eyes shut when he should have been doing something productive. Researching new banks, studying, actually paying attention in class. In the end he always managed to drag himself to his feet, propel himself forward, but he wished he didn’t have to. He wished everything would stop.

Give Ren something to do.

Akechi blinked, looked at his phone.

Tapped the reply button, wrote, _Thank you very much for these resources, Sae-san._ Copied Ren. Hit “Send.”

Closed his eyes again and waited for the announcement for his station.

***

The apartment smelled like curry, felt like home. Akechi paused on the threshold, taking it all in: the red blanket draped across the couch, from which Morgana was uncoiling; his desk, not two feet away, immaculately clean; the shelf above it, laden with books, his and Ren’s both. Ren’s shoes on the rug, his coat on the rack, the man himself at the stove, peering into a steaming pot with a look of intense concentration.

“Hey,” Ren said, looking around, smiling. “I’m making curry.”

“I smelled,” Akechi murmured, bending down to scritch Morgana’s ears as the cat sidled up to him. “Hello, Morgana.”

“Hi!” Morgana meowed, rubbing against his shins. “You stink!”

“I took the subway.”

“How’d it go?” Ren asked, picking up his spoon.

“All right. We read the letters.” Akechi took off his coat, his scarf, his shoes, mechanical, automatic. His hands were not shaking. “Shido was, as ever, an asshole.”

Ren snorted. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“It shouldn’t have surprised me either,” Akechi sighed, slipping up behind him, peering over his shoulder into the simmering sauce. “It was foolish, keeping those letters all this time. I can’t explain why I did it.”

Ren tapped his temple against Akechi’s. “You wanted them to be good letters, but you knew they wouldn’t be, so you kept them and didn’t look at them. Just in case.”

This felt so true that Akechi’s heart throbbed. “How do you _know_ these things?” he asked, or tried to, because it came out more like a croak. “How can you understand me even when I don’t?”

“It’s what I would’ve done.” Ren leaned his head against Akechi’s, cheek to cheek, and stirred the curry. “Sat on them. Hid from them until I couldn’t anymore. I get it.”

Akechi wrapped his arms around Ren’s waist, pressed against his back. He was blinded by a crystalline sheen of tears; couldn’t risk blinking, or they’d spill over. “Ren. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

Ren stood up straight, started to turn around; but Akechi held firm, burying his face in the side of his neck. Ren settled for twisting in Akechi’s grasp, lifting his arm over Akechi’s head so he could settle it across his shoulders.

“We’re not fighting,” he said, half surprised, half soothing. “I already told you I forgave you.”

“I know, but—” Akechi’s lungs shuddered on the inhale, and he vaguely registered the _click_ of Ren switching the burner off. “I just don’t—”

“Akechi, it’s okay.” Ren brought his other arm around—sometimes Akechi wondered if he even had a spine, he was so flexible—and pulled Akechi closer, cupping the back of his head. “I’m not mad at you. Are you mad at me?”

“No.” Breathe in, out. Focus on the cut of Ren’s clavicle, the rise and fall of his ribs, his scent, lotus shampoo and detergent and coffee grounds and flowers. “I’ve been terrible to you.”

“You were terrible that first day,” Ren said. “But you’ve been much better since.”

“I’ve been angry with you this entire time.”

Ren laughed. “I thought you said you weren’t mad at me.”

“I’m not anymore.” If Akechi held on any tighter, he was going to break something important, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. “But I have been.”

“That’s okay.”

“No it isn’t. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Have you been talking to Chuichi about me?”

Despite himself, Akechi sighed through his nose. “No. Not about that, anyway.”

“Then what about?”

“I don’t want to talk about therapy, I want to apologize. For being an ass. For not appreciating—” Ren made a complicated sort of wriggle, like a cat, so he could face Akechi properly, smoothing his fingers through Akechi’s hair while Akechi’s forehead settled into the crook of his neck. “You’re so fucking patient with me, always, and I pay it back in nastiness. It’s not fair.”

“You don’t always,” Ren murmured, drawing circles in the small of Akechi’s back. “Shido brings out the worst in you. But we knew that.”

“You should have dumped me a hundred times.”

“For having a bad day?”

“For having a bad _life_.”

“This has really done a number on you, huh.” Ren’s sigh tickled Akechi’s ear. “I wish you’d let me help. I want to.”

“Checked your email lately?” Akechi muttered, and burrowed closer when Ren stirred. “I ran into Sae at the train station yesterday.”

He could almost hear Ren raise his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yes. I told her what was going on and she suggested I contact an aid fund. Apparently they can sometimes help pay for things like this. Anyway, she sent me the list of numbers today and I forwarded it to you.”

Ren was holding his breath. Akechi swallowed hard, shouldered through every instinct howling at him to stop, and ground out: “I would be—grateful—if you would call them. And explain. And see if they can assist.”

“Of course I will,” Ren said at once. Akechi squeezed his eyes shut against the blinding light of Ren’s resolve, glittering like a jewel behind his sternum. “I’ll start tomorrow, first thing.”

Akechi’s skin tried to climb off his body even as his muscles relaxed, the discomfiting itch of vulnerability warring with the warmth of relief. It was... _nice_ to be able to rely on someone, as much as it set his teeth on edge having to.

And now that he’d given Ren something to do, maybe—

He lifted his head, squared his shoulders, looked at Ren. Ren started to wipe Akechi’s cheeks, but Akechi batted him away.

“What would you do,” Akechi said, “if it was up to you?”

Ren blinked. “About what?”

“About the ashes. I know you won’t tell me what _I_ should do. But what would _you_ do if they called and offered them to you?”

Akechi watched the doors close behind Ren’s eyes, watched him curl in on himself as he decided whether or not to answer. Akechi stood still and silent, waiting.

It probably only took a moment, but it seemed like forever before Ren met his gaze again, dark eyes hard as jade.

“I would take them,” he said quietly, “and dump them down the sewer, where that piece of shit belongs.”

Akechi burst out laughing. He actually threw his head back, stumbled, caught himself on the couch. God, how long had it been since he’d laughed like this? Not since Shido died, certainly. It made him feel _clean_ , polished and shiny and new.

“You and Sae think alike,” he wheezed, wiping his streaming eyes. “She said I should dump them in an alley.”

“For the rats,” Ren said, with Joker’s wicked smile. “ _Yeah._ I like that better.”

“Me too!” Morgana said, springing onto the back of the couch, tail lashing. “Or, ooh, we could take them out to Inaba and put them in somebody’s manure!”

“Shido’s final resting place, a literal pile of shit,” Akechi said, snickering. “Very fitting.”

“I bet we could figure out where fish guts go after they’ve been processed,” Ren put in. “We could mix them with the runoff.”

“Any offal would do, really.”

Ren said, “Akechi?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“I’m really glad you don’t, uh.” Ren scratched the back of his head. “Secretly love him now, or something.”

Akechi couldn’t help it: he bristled.

“I mean, if you did, that would be fine,” Ren added quickly. “It’s complicated; parents are tough; I get it. On some level you probably do love him. I just—”

“You’re relieved that I haven’t forgotten what he did,” Akechi supplied, trying to lower his hackles.

“Yeah.” Ren scratched his head again, harder. “Not that I think you have to remember forever, or be angry forever—”

Akechi had clung to enough self-control to properly interpret the tight hunch of Ren’s shoulders, the sideways cut of his eyes. He was nervous. He didn’t want to upset Akechi, so he was babbling, scrambling for the right thing to say to make everything okay.

“Ren,” said Akechi, silencing him. “I understand.”

Ren tensed, relaxed. “Yeah. Okay.”

To prove it, Akechi held out his hand. Ren took it, stepped closer, studied Akechi’s face.

“I don’t know what I want to do with them,” Akechi said quietly, “but I have to take them.”

“I figured.”

“I asked Yusuke to look after them for me.” Ren’s eyes widened. “So they don’t have to stay here. I don’t want to make you live with them.” Akechi hadn’t forgotten what Ryuji had said, after all, even though Ryuji had texted him to apologize. “With _him_.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Ren,” said Akechi. “Please don’t lie to me to spare my feelings.”

Ren squeezed his hand.

“At this point,” Akechi added, “I’m all but certain I don’t want to keep them forever. But I don’t know yet what should happen to them, so they’ll stay with Yusuke until I do.”

“That’s smart,” Ren said. “That’s really smart.”

“I do make sensible choices from time to time.”

“You’re the most sensible person I know.”

“You need better friends.”

Ren grinned, and Morgana leapt to his feet. “ _O_ -kay, that’s enough!” he declared. “You guys aren’t allowed to do anything gross right now!”

Akechi eyed him. “Who said we were—”

“It’s obvious,” Morgana yowled, whapping Akechi’s arm. “And I’m hungry! Save the makeouts for after dinner!”

“I think we can handle that,” Ren said, tugging Akechi back to the stove.

He pulled Akechi’s arm across his waist, and Akechi looped the other one around him too, leaning readily against him while he resumed his watch over the curry.

***

“Take me through the timeline,” Chuichi said. “Aiku went to work for your father, and then...”

They were, once again, sitting in Chuichi’s office. Akechi was running out of time. The deadline was only a week away, and he’d called every bank in Tokyo to no avail. None of the aid funds had gotten back to Ren, who was now looking for others. Akechi didn’t hold out much hope that they’d find one.

But that wasn’t why he was trembling.

Threading his gloved fingers together on his crossed knees, Akechi recounted what Nyarlathotep had told him. Masayoshi Shido had hired Aiku Akechi straight out of college—she would have been about Goro’s current age—and immediately begun sexually harassing her. That harassment had progressed to Goro’s miserable conception, to his mother being fired, to Shido telling anyone who would listen that she was worthless. Cutting off every avenue she had to pursue the bright future she deserved.

Chuichi had heard all of this before, and he nodded along until that point. “Did Nyarlathotep mention how Shido reacted when Aiku told him she was pregnant?”

“Not specifically.”

“Hmm. Have you ever wondered about that?”

“About what Shido thought?”

“About what he might have done, or said. I’m trying to imagine it, myself.” Chuichi’s hands moved restlessly across the surface of his desk, like he was categorizing his thoughts. “Masayoshi Shido, relying on his pristine reputation to get ahead, assaults his staffer. That staffer then comes to him and tells him she’s pregnant. What would he do?”

“Throw her out the door,” Akechi replied. “Discredit her.”

“Not ask her, or tell her, or force her to abort the child?”

A cold wind, like Death’s breath, brushed the back of Akechi’s neck.

“Or force her to marry him?” Chuichi mused. “Get her parents involved? He could control the narrative, then. He could say they were in love.”

“She wouldn’t have allowed that.”

“Which one?”

“Either. Both. She wouldn’t have—”

Chuichi tilted his head. “How do you know?”

Because. _Because_. Akechi didn’t know what Aiku’s working life had been like when he was very small, but he’d never met any kind of procurer; she’d never taken or sold any drugs, at least in front of him; by the time he was old enough to look after himself, she was seeing clients in their home, and then almost exclusively elsewhere. The last year of her life, she’d left for work dressed to the nines and come home smelling of cigar smoke and whiskey. It hadn’t been respectable per se, and Akechi had no way to know if she’d found it fulfilling, but she’d controlled what she did and when. Aiku Akechi had always, always called her own shots.

Which was why it had been so upsetting, so scary, when she’d fallen ill.

“She would never have let him control her,” Akechi said. “Never.”

Chuichi nodded slowly. “What did she tell you about him?”

She’d never said his father’s name. Whenever Akechi had asked about his parentage, Aiku’s face had gone hard and closed, and she’d said, “He was a rotten excuse for a man. You’re better off without him.”

And he’d believed her.

“How did you find out who he was, then?”

This, he remembered well. He was thirteen, just. Aiku had been dead for going on three years, and he’d been through six institutions. This most recent one had, luxury of luxuries, a television in the common area, mounted to the wall so none of the children could touch it. Most of the time, it played the news.

One afternoon, Goro had glanced up from a comic book to see a man behind a podium, surrounded by microphones. He was tall, and broad, with a black goatee across a chiseled jaw and black hair tied in a high ponytail at the back of his head. He wore orange glasses over yellow eyes, and something about his expression—fierce, ferocious, cunning—made Goro sit up and put his book aside.

The man was, he learned, Masayoshi Shido, currently running for the House of Councillors after serving for four years in the House of Representatives. Though he was relatively new to the national stage, he’d gained a lot of attention. There was, one of the reporters fawned, just something _about_ him.

It was dreadfully boring, but Goro kept watching. A headache began to throb behind his eyes, in his forehead, spreading like spiderwebs across the top of his skull.

And then Shido nodded at a reporter in the front row. She got to her feet and said, “Shido-san, do you recall a staffer named Aiku Akechi?”

Goro sat bolt upright.

Shido stared at the woman. When he spoke, frost seemed to bloom across his lips. “I do not recognize the name,” he said, “no.”

Goro looked around the room. No one else was paying attention, even the caretakers. He almost wished they were. He almost wished they would look at him and say, “Akechi? Isn’t that _your_ name?”

“She worked for you thirteen years ago,” the reporter said, consulting her notebook. “I understand that when she left your office, there were rumors of sexual harassment?”

Thunder clapped over Shido’s expression. “Nonsense. I have never once been accused of such a thing. In fact I find the suggestion odious in the extreme.”

“She was a promising young woman,” the reporter insisted. “Very bright. Her professors spoke highly of her. She worked in your office in Inaba for six months, departed under strange circumstances, disappeared. Can you speak to that at all?”

“I cannot,” Shido said, already turning away, pointing at someone else. “Yes?”

Goro had spent the next several days hungrily watching the TV, leaping at every mention of Shido. When they went into town, he scanned every headline and magazine cover. Shido’s name, his face, were everywhere, but his transgressions were not. No one mentioned Aiku Akechi again. The reporter did not appear at any more conferences. It was like only she, Shido, and Goro had heard the conversation. Like only they remembered Aiku’s name.

After that, it was only a matter of time before he heard Robin Hood’s voice. The rage had built in him to a boil. It had never really ebbed.

“So he knew her,” said Chuichi, here and now. “He remembered her. It’s not like she walked out of his life and into oblivion. He _knew_ her, and he knew about you.”

“Yes,” Akechi said. “Of course he did. How else could he have ensured that she never had another worthwhile job?”

“He could have killed her.”

The cold, clammy patch on the back of Akechi’s neck expanded, icy fingers creeping down his spine.

“He didn’t yet have the means,” he managed. “He wasn’t powerful enough.”

“Until you met him?”

“Until _he_ met _me._ Until I went to him with Loki.”

He’d been in Shibuya Crossing, trying to delete a strange app from his phone. He’d glanced up, frozen at the sight of what he now knew was Loki, looming over the crowd, sword spinning. He’d fled into the subway.

Mementos had almost devoured him. He’d almost fallen to a fucking _Slime_ before Loki saved him.

“Why didn’t he kill you, Akechi?” Chuichi asked.

Akechi’s throat convulsed around something like a laugh, shrill and ragged. “I was useful. He needed me.”

“As a teenager. But not as a child.”

The ice spread across his ribs, around to his sternum, pierced his heart. “What are you saying.”

“I’m saying, why did he let you live, all those years?”

“He didn’t—”

All the air gusted out of Akechi’s lungs. Chuichi stared at him, steady, level.

“Why did he let your mother leave?”

Oh.

“Nyarlathotep told you Aiku couldn’t find another job because Shido prevented it,” Chuichi said, tapping the desk. The thump-thump-thump of his finger reverberated inside Akechi’s skull. “And that may have been true.”

Oh, no.

“But I wonder if there was another reason. If she _chose_ the work she did, so that—”

 _So that she could hide_.

Akechi pitched forward, braced his elbows on his knees, pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. The pounding in his head was no longer Chuichi’s finger: it was his own heartbeat, roaring in his ears, resounding through every hollow of his body. Squeezing his lungs. Twisting his stomach.

Why had Shido let him live? _Because he hadn’t known where Goro was_. Because Aiku had fled from Goro’s father, from his threats or his promises or both, and hidden. Taken jobs that would let her live out of sight. Moved constantly: Goro had never understood why they found new apartments every few months. In fact it had upset him, because it often meant changing schools and leaving behind fledgling friends and learning an entirely new neighborhood when he’d barely learned the old one. He’d complained about it often. Aiku hadn’t listened.

He’d thought she liked being a nomad, thought she couldn’t stand to stay still, when really—really—

“But,” he wheezed, pressing his nails into his scalp, anchoring himself to the pain, “but that doesn’t make any sense. If she—if she did all of that—for me—then why did she leave me alone in the end?”

“Does it have to make sense?”

Didn’t it? _Didn’t it_? “ _Doesn’t it_?”

“Akechi,” said Chuichi, and the warmth in his tone told Akechi he was smiling. “We’ve already discussed that people don’t always make sense. They’re people.”

Except, if that was true, then how was Akechi supposed to read them, navigate them, anticipate their movements? If anyone could turn on him at any moment, how was he supposed to _live_?

How had Aiku lived, all that time?

“Besides,” Chuichi added, “we’ve reviewed her symptoms before. Depression hits like a truck. She was sick, and she died. It wasn’t up to her.”

She’d been going to interviews at the end. Trying to find a new job. Coming home from work exhausted, shuffling off to sell herself in an entirely different way, getting back with konbini food for Goro and then curling up in bed. Offering monosyllabic answers to his questions. Fake smiles for his accomplishments. Dragging herself out from under the blankets, putting on her makeup and her nice clothes, kissing his hair before she left for the night. How long had she been depressed? How long had she been flinging herself into a wall before she’d flung herself off a bridge?

Her situation was suffocating to contemplate. Cut off from friends and possibly family, opening your body to strangers to make a living, constantly breaking leases and packing boxes and hardly unpacking before the alarm bells sounded and sent you on the run again. Always moving. Never stopping to breathe. And when you tried to change course, when you finally reached out into the world and asked for help, nobody came. You were trapped. You were alone.

The worst part, the _worst_ part, was realizing how badly he’d misjudged her. He’d always known she was strong; had never for a moment believed that committing suicide was a sign of weakness. But he’d given all of her agency to Shido. Shido was still the root of it, the beginning and middle and end, but for a while Aiku had been hurtling forward with the same impossible conviction that Goro saw in Ren, shielding her son, carving out a life in spite of the man who had tried to destroy her future. And Goro had never given her the credit she deserved. He’d cast her as a victim in his narrative, a light to his fuse, and not the fully realized protagonist of her own story.

She’d been so brave and fought so hard.

But for what? For a sniveling toddler? For a helpless, stupid little boy who couldn’t appreciate her sacrifice? Who couldn’t be grateful for the roof over his head or the decent education or the full belly he enjoyed? Sure, she didn’t have time to cook meals for him; sure, she couldn’t buy him nice clothes or fancy toys; but she gave him what he needed, sometimes more, and why wasn’t that enough? Why was it never enough? Why was he this black hole, constantly sapping her energy and her money and her life?

Was it worth it?

It couldn’t possibly have been worth it.

“Goro,” Ren said, suddenly there, kneeling down with his palms gentle against Goro’s damp cheeks. “Hey. There you are.”

“Ren,” Akechi mumbled. “How—”

“I called him,” Chuichi said. He was standing beside Akechi, one hand on the back of Akechi’s chair. “You were...I didn’t think you should try to get home by yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Akechi said, but he couldn’t move. Exhaustion had settled like lead into the marrow of his bones, fusing him to his seat. “I—”

“Akechi,” said Chuichi, leaning down to meet Akechi’s gaze. “Listen to me. If you start to think about hurting yourself, you _must_ tell someone. You have my mobile number; you can call me any hour of any day.”

“I’m not going to hurt myself,” Akechi said, but he barely recognized his own voice, dull and heavy.

Ren took Akechi’s hands, stood, pulled Akechi up with him. Akechi swayed on his feet; his legs didn’t quite remember how to work.

Chuichi said something to Ren in an undertone. Ren nodded, still studying Akechi, jaw set and brow furrowed. He was worried. Probably about Akechi. Hilarious. Ridiculous. Akechi wished he could muster a reaction.

“Let’s go home,” Ren said, steering Akechi gently around.

By the time they reached the sidewalk, Akechi’s brain had stitched together enough neurons for him to shrug Ren off.

“I can walk,” he said, irritably. A piercing throb across his forehead foretold a migraine. “I’m all right.”

“Okay,” Ren said, putting his hands in his pockets.

“You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” Akechi added, heading for the station. Wasn’t Ren supposed to be somewhere else? Class? No, it was too late in the day for that. What day was it, anyway? “I could have taken a cab home.”

“Chuichi said you needed me, so I came.”

“Of course you did,” Akechi muttered. “You’re always looking for an excuse to coddle me. It’s pathetic.”

“It’s because I love you.”

Akechi’s breath hitched; he stumbled; Ren caught his sleeve half a second before he regained his balance. Scowling, Akechi jerked away.

“ _I’m fine_. Stop pawing at me.”

“What did you talk about that upset you so much?”

Shoving the station door open, Akechi fumbled for his commuter card. “I’m not upset.”

“Uh-huh.” Ren pressed his own card into Akechi’s hand and picked Akechi’s pocket as he pushed him through the turnstile. “Chuichi wouldn’t tell me.”

“As well he shouldn’t,” Akechi snapped, standing there like an idiot while Ren used _Akechi’s_ card to get through the gate. “It’s private.”

“So you don’t want to talk about it.” Ren took his card back, returned Akechi’s wallet, and headed toward their platform.

“No,” Akechi said, following him. “I don’t.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to try to drag it out of me?”

Ren glanced at him. “When have I ever dragged anything out of you?”

Akechi had nothing to say to that, not least because his throat had tightened around a tearful lump.

It was rush hour and the train was packed wall-to-wall. (It must have been packed wall-to-wall while Ren was making his way to Ginza, too. Or had he taken a cab? They should have taken a cab. Why had Akechi stormed toward the station? He should’ve thought this through.) Somehow, Ren squirmed through the crowd to the seats, and the moment one opened, Akechi was in it. He was pretty sure Ren had pushed him.

He looked at Ren, standing over him, gazing nonchalantly off to one side, and opened his mouth to protest. But every muscle in his body cried havoc at the thought of moving again, so he gave up, and slumped back.

If Ren hadn’t been there, Akechi would’ve missed their stop. He wasn’t thinking about anything, wasn’t distracted, but he still jumped when Ren tapped his shoulder and nodded toward the opening doors. Then he got annoyed with himself for jumping, so he rose and elbowed through the crowd and gave Ren all of two seconds to join him before he stalked across the platform and up the stairs. He knew Ren was right behind him, though. Ren was always right behind him, unless he was two steps ahead.

Akechi was _so tired_.

He was so tired that the walk back to their apartment took twice as long. That he went from stalking to striding to trudging, dragging his heels on the pavement. That the streets seemed longer and darker than usual, the air colder, biting his ears and whipping his back. That when Ren put his arm around Akechi’s shoulders and pulled him close, sharing warmth, Akechi didn’t shrug him off. Couldn’t shrug him off.

When they reached their building, Akechi instinctively pulled out his keys, but his keyring was such a jumble—he only had four keys, it shouldn’t have been so difficult—that he found himself swallowing a frustrated sob. Ren took them, unlocked the front door, held it open. But Ren didn’t give his keys back, so when they got to _their_ door, Akechi had to stand there useless while Ren opened that one too.

Morgana was waiting for them on the rug, eyes wide and shining. He twined around Akechi’s legs. Akechi fumbled at his buttons, and Ren left him to it, taking off his own coat and shoes and retreating to the kitchenette. Presently Akechi heard water running into the kettle.

Akechi hung up his coat, his scarf, stuffed his gloves into his coat pocket, took off his shoes. Put his face in his hands. Shuddered.

“You should lay down,” Morgana said, somehow speaking and purring at the same time.

It was a good idea. A _great_ idea, even. Akechi stumbled through the curtain, climbed into bed, and was asleep.

He woke up to the front door opening and shutting. The panic that thrilled through him was tempered somewhat by Morgana’s heavy, vibrating weight on his chest. He lay still, listening, holding his breath. There was a rustling, and then Ren came in clutching a huge paper bag.

“Hey,” he said, leaning over to kiss Akechi’s forehead. Akechi’s throat tightened. “I ordered food.”

“That’s not in the budget,” Akechi croaked, as Ren switched on the bedside light.

“It’s fine. I’ll pick up an extra shift or something.”

A memory, unbidden: Goro had come home from school coughing and shivering after feeling awful all day. Aiku had taken one look at him and said, “Bed. Time for bed.” His protests—it was still light out, he wanted to watch Featherman, he was _fine_ , really—went unheeded as she herded him into their room and under the covers. For two days he lay there quaking, coughing, breaking out into cold sweats. He got up only to use the bathroom, liquid both ways. Aiku was there the entire time, in and out of the bedroom with compresses and warm broth and water, brisk and competent as a real doctor.

Only later did he realize that she’d skipped work to care for him. Only later did he understand why, for the next week, she bought only enough food for Goro at the konbini.

“Scoot,” Ren said, nudging Akechi.

Akechi scooted. Ren sat down beside him and opened the bag, freeing the rich aroma of miso soup, nikujaga, udon, rice. Something sweet, too. Some kind of bun.

“Where did you order from?” Akechi asked, suspicion dawning in his chest.

Ren started stacking containers on the nightstand. “That’s a secret.”

“Ren. Who brought this over?”

“...Ryuji.”

Akechi groaned and flopped his arm across his eyes. “So everyone knows I’m unwell.”

“If they don’t already, they will soon.” Ren prodded Akechi’s cheek with a packet of chopsticks. “Sit up.”

Morgana had gone, springing off the bed to await his own portion, so Akechi got his elbows underneath him. “I’m not hungry, you know.”

Ren prodded him again, more insistently. _Tsk_ ing, Akechi snatched the packet from him.

“You should at least eat some rice,” Ren said, scooping some into a bowl. “Keep your strength up.”

“But I’m not—”

Ren pressed the bowl into Akechi’s hands. “Try the rice,” he said, gently. “Then we’ll see about the rest.”

In the end, Akechi finished the rice, a serving of soup, and a milk bun. Feeling better, he got out of bed to help Ren wash the dishes and put everything away. He had grand ambitions after that: he would brush his teeth, clearing the mingled flavors of sleep-sour and miso, and then he would get some schoolwork done. He had a paper due next week and he was, of course, well on his way to finishing it, but it needed a bit more editing—

He got as far as teeth-brushing before his body betrayed him. He spat into the basin, rinsed his toothbrush, and put his heavy head down on the edge of the sink. In a flash Ren was there (Morgana had probably alerted him, sneaky cat), steering Akechi back to bed. Tucking Akechi’s hair behind his ear, the blanket beneath his chin. It hurt. It reminded him of his mother and it hurt.

But he slept. For once in his life, he didn’t dream.


	4. i put this heavy heart in you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **cw:** depression, references to suicide

So it went. Akechi slept, he woke up, he got out of bed determined to be normal and crashed after accomplishing practically nothing. Ren fed him. Morgana snuggled with him. He barely moved.

When he wasn’t berating himself for lying around, he was thinking about his mother. About walking with her to the store. Sharing crepes, ice cream, kakigori. Traveling across town to the park. Convincing her to play with him, making her play the damsel in distress in his epic stories. Spending hours at the bathhouse, running around firing his toy gun at beetles, getting home in time for her to kiss his cheek and push him toward the bathroom to brush his teeth, squinting into their mirror still fogged with steam.

Waking her up by accident from a nap and watching the frustration flicker across her face before she shoved it behind a door. Arguing with her about whether or not to move _again_ , demanding to know why, getting no answer. Stomping his feet. Shouting. Trying to make her understand that she was tearing apart his life every time she did this. Watching her fold her fury up and pack it into the boxes alongside their clothes.

Thinking about running away. About going to live at the bathhouse, where at least someone seemed to care about him. The attendants were always asking him about his games. She never did that, anymore.

Now, so many years later, Goro could trace the slow descent. It wasn’t like a switch flipping; Aiku hadn’t woken up different one day. Her patience had gotten gradually thinner, her fuse shorter. Once or twice she’d yelled at him, actually yelled, though now he couldn’t recall about what. The shadows under her eyes darkened; the bones of her wrists stood out; she went grey, slumped like a dying plant. Every few days, she put on her favorite sundress, her blue cardigan, and went out smiling stiffly; she came back even greyer than before. She started coming back and getting straight into bed. Clambered out only to heat up dinner. Eventually stopped doing that too. Stopped opening her eyes when Goro crawled underneath the covers with her. Kept going to work, kept going to interviews. Kept going to the store, but never with Goro anymore. Never to the park. Never anywhere else.

Still, still, it hadn’t occurred to Goro that she might be dying. He knew she was sick, but he assumed she’d get better.

Certainly he’d never guessed she would kill herself.

Late Sunday afternoon, after he’d gotten up to do some reading and laid back down after one chapter, he wondered if she’d felt like this. Wondered _how long_ she’d felt like this, before she succumbed.

***

Akechi awoke with cotton in his mouth and sunlight visible through the blinds and low voices—one Morgana’s, one quieter and feminine—in the next room. He was so addled that for a terrifying moment he thought the feminine voice was _his mother_ , back from the dead, or maybe never dead at all, maybe hiding from him, except that he’d seen the body. Someone had had to identify the body and so he’d seen it. It was amazing, how utterly water could change a person.

That memory spurred him to stop, focus, center; and presently the voice resolved into Haru Okumura’s. Had Akechi known she was coming over? Yes: his brain reluctantly divulged the details: Ren, bending down that morning to kiss him goodbye, had told him, “Haru’s going to stop by later to keep you company.” Akechi hadn’t had the energy to protest.

Now, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to get up, much less get dressed. He hadn’t showered in four days and couldn’t do so without going into the living room, at which point he’d be accosted by Haru and the cat. He probably smelled. Maybe if he went back to sleep—

“Akechi?” Haru said, poking her head through the curtain. “Ah! I thought I heard you moving around.”

“Oh, hello,” Akechi said, resisting the urge to burrow deeper into the covers. “How are you?”

She smiled, and then hid it behind her hand. “I’m well! I’m making hot chocolate.”

“You’re—”

“The cream’s just heating up now. Come along. I don’t want it to scorch.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to,” Haru replied promptly. “I love hot chocolate, don’t you? It’s so soothing. I used to drink it all the time when—” She paused, and for a moment he thought she’d upset herself somehow; but then she gasped and whirled around. “The marshmallows. Mona-chan!” she cried, hurrying back through the curtain. “Don’t have too many!”

Sighing, Akechi rolled out of bed. Despite Ren’s best efforts, Akechi didn’t have much by way of sit-around-the-house clothes, so he dug into Ren’s drawer. He settled on a soft, scoop-neck sweater (red, Ren’s favorite) with dark blue jeans, cozy and comfortable and smelling wonderfully of Ren.

By now the apartment, too, smelled wonderfully of simmering cream and melted chocolate. Haru was busy at the counter, Morgana sulking on the back of the couch. The cat brightened at the sight of Akechi.

“Those are Ren’s clothes,” he said. “I’m telling.”

“He won’t care,” Akechi countered, tugging at the sweater. It was a little big on him, baggy in the shoulders. “He’s always offering me his things.”

“You’re just crabby because I took the marshmallows away,” Haru said, reaching back to pinch Morgana’s cheek. “But I didn’t bring that many!”

They were bunny-shaped, with tiny black eyes and X’s for mouths. Akechi padded over to watch Haru ladle the thick, dark liquid chocolate into two oversized mugs and then gently add three bunnies apiece. They looked cute, and betrayed.

“There,” she said triumphantly, setting down the pan. “All done.”

“It looks lovely, Haru,” Akechi murmured. The bunnies in his mug bobbed along the surface of the chocolate, scowling at the ceiling. “And smells lovely too.”

Haru beamed at him. “Thank you!” she chirped. “Let’s sit. But don’t drink it yet! It’s much too hot.”

Akechi expected an interrogation. He expected her to clasp her hands in her lap, lean forward with wide, sad eyes, and say, “How _are_ you?” in that cloyingly mournful tone people liked to use when they pitied you. Instead, she turned to him and said, “You’ll be pleased to know that I fired Takamura-san!”

Akechi raised his eyebrows. “I am pleased to hear that,” he said. “What changed your mind?”

“What made up my mind, rather,” Haru said, crossing her ankles. “I thought about what you said, of course, and realized you were right. I can’t cling to the people my father hired simply because they’ve been there the longest. The rot runs deep.” She made a shearing motion with her fingers. “I have to cut it out.”

Akechi remembered that conversation well. Haru hadn’t asked for his opinion, per se; they’d been transplanting a rootbound monstera when the conversation strayed to the upper-level employees at her company. (She still referred to it as her father’s company sometimes, but it was hers, and Akechi was careful to make the distinction.) Haru had spent the past several years trying to reeducate executives and middle managers alike, hoping she could maintain their institutional knowledge while teaching them to be better, kinder supervisors. Some of them had readily adopted her approach, and their employees flourished. But many more had simply started hiding their nastiness behind a sycophantic mask.

Takamura-san was one of Big Bang’s many assistant directors, overseeing some department or other in the philanthropic section. When Haru ascended, he’d been all sweetness and light, speaking up in favor of her proposals and pitching employee retention measures left and right. But it was all lip service. Behind the scenes, Takamura was a taskmaster, and abusive to boot. He’d fired one of his employees when she disclosed her pregnancy, and she’d gone to Haru to blow the whistle.

“But I don’t know what to do,” Haru had sighed, snipping at the monstera’s tangled root ball. “I know I should let him go, but that will only place more pressure on his people. And it will take months to find a suitable replacement.”

“You’re better off without him,” Akechi had replied as he wiped out the monstera’s old pot. “His reports will be happier without him snarling at them all the time. As for replacing him—just promote someone from inside his office. Hell, give the whistleblower his job. She clearly knows what’s best for everyone.”

And so, apparently, Haru had. Takamura was gone and his successor, now three months away from maternity leave, had turned everything around. People were smiling. Work was getting done faster and better than ever before. The other day, Haru had poked her head into the room and caught several of them laughing—laughing!—together over something on their phones. That would never have happened under Takamura.

“So I’m grateful,” Haru said. “Thank you so much for your insight.”

“You would have figured it out regardless.”

“Yes, but you gave me the push I needed to make the leap. Thank you, truly.”

They lounged on the couch, meandering between plants and cooking and work and school. They finished their hot chocolate and Haru made another batch. Akechi ate every single one of his marshmallows.

And when Morgana quirked one eye open and said, “Almost time for class,” Akechi was startled by how long they’d been talking, and how...normal he felt. The fog was still there, settled like condensation overtop of his brain, but he could almost, almost think in a straight line for the first time in days. He saw Haru out, showered, ate lunch, and went to class with Morgana huddled in his schoolbag, feeling only slightly exposed and vulnerable.

Unfortunately, class took it out of him again. He drifted home with a headache wrapped around his skull and wires threaded through his jaw, his fingertips white on the strap of his bag. Maybe he should have stayed home, but winter break was coming up, and after that it would be a straight shot downhill into his final exams and then graduation. He couldn’t afford to miss any classes. He also couldn’t afford to miss any homework, and he was already dreading the final edits he had to make to his paper tonight—

Makoto Niijima was waiting for him outside the apartment building. Frowning, Akechi slowed down.

Morgana popped out of Akechi’s bag. “Ren texted you,” he reminded him.

Akechi looked, and deflated. _Makoto’ll be there when you get home,_ Ren had written, followed by a series of multicolored hearts.

“Makoto,” Akechi called, making his way to her.

“Akechi,” she said, clasping her hands together. She was prim and proper as always, spine straight, shoulders level, heels and toes together. Of all the Thieves, Akechi was fairly sure she liked him the least. He was surprised she’d agreed to this. “It’s nice to see you.”

“And you,” Akechi said, entirely honestly. “If you’re here to keep an eye on me—”

“Not at all,” Makoto said. “Ren said you needed help editing a paper.”

Akechi stared at her, realized his mouth was open, closed it. “I don’t,” he said, trying to sound calm, pretty sure he failed. Why would Ren say that? Akechi was perfectly capable of doing his own work; he didn’t need anyone thinking otherwise. “I’m nearly finished.”

“But not completely.” Makoto nodded solemnly. “Shall we?”

Ugh. Akechi didn’t have the energy to argue. He fished out his keys, unlocked the door, gestured for her to precede him.

“Right, then,” Makoto said once they were inside, unslinging her own bag. “Tell me everything. What class is this for?”

They wound up on the couch, huddled together, peering at his tablet. Makoto was actually very helpful: gentle about the few outright errors he’d made, thoughtful about his phrasing and his arguments. Often she voiced what he was thinking before he’d had time to articulate it. At about six, the doorbell rang, and Akechi went down to find a delivery man with a bag of Chinese food. Courtesy of Ren, a text confirmed. They ate, and finished the paper, and Akechi asked for her help on another assignment, and then they’d gone through almost all of his schoolwork for the week and she was putting on her shoes and accepting his offer to walk her to the station.

They’d gone two blocks, breath misting in the air, when Akechi’s curiosity won out. “Do you dislike me?” he asked.

Makoto stared at him. “No! Why would I?”

“I can think of a dozen reasons.”

“You haven’t given me any reason to dislike you in years.”

“Still,” Akechi said. “Old habits.”

Makoto winced. “This always happens,” she muttered, tugging at her scarf. “People think—no, Akechi, I don’t dislike you. I’d like for us to be friends. I just don’t...quite know how to accomplish that.”

“Ah,” said Akechi softly. He didn’t either.

They walked along in silence, punctured only by the sharp report of their heels off the pavement. Then, as the station came into view, Makoto stopped and pulled out her phone.

“Sae and I have dinner together every week,” she said, thumbs flying across the screen. “Usually we go out, but sometimes I go to her place. You should join us next time.”

Akechi’s phone pinged. He blinked at the screen, at the notification that he’d been added to a group message. Makoto, Sae, and himself. Niijima-Akechi.

“I’ll text you,” Makoto said, lifting her chin. “Okay?”

Akechi swallowed the sudden tightness in his throat, stuffed his phone back into his pocket. “Yes. Please do.”

“Good night, Akechi.”

He watched her march toward the station, briefly silhouetted against the light pouring through the doors. Then she was gone, disappearing inside.

It went on like that. Every day, Akechi woke up with his head spinning and his stomach clenched around a peach pit. Every day, Ren and Morgana nudged him out of bed, to breakfast, to the bathroom, to class. When Ren couldn’t be there, he assigned one of his ( _their_ ) friends to be there instead, in person and virtually. Sumire, pulling Akechi out the door for a walk. Ryuji with his Switch, roping Akechi into several rounds of Splatoon. Ann and her first-friend-then-girlfriend-now-ex-girlfriend-but-still-very-dear-friend Shiho, taking him to the tea shop Ann loved so much. Akihiko, Naoto, Yosuke Hanamura, Aigis, and Yu, by video chat at various intervals.

Every day, the fog ebbed a little further. Every day, Akechi felt a little better. At least until he remembered why he was depressed, or until his body and brain compelled him to lie down again; but there was always someone around to watch over him while he slept.

Time moved strangely. When he was with other people, it hurtled past; otherwise it dragged, clinging like manacles to his ankles. And yet, when he tried to remember what he’d done on any given day, where he’d been, who he’d seen, his mind went blank. It took real effort to recall his daily experiences, no matter how good they’d been. Akechi couldn’t believe it hadn’t even been a week since he’d seen Chuichi. It felt like years.

On Thursdays, Akechi had three morning classes in a row. By the end of the last one, he was so exhausted that he was genuinely afraid he wouldn’t make it back home. He shuffled across campus on leaden limbs, pain radiating from his shoulders up his neck to pool at the base of his skull, from which he knew it would eventually spread to encompass his entire head—

“Hey!” Morgana fussed, springing from his bag onto his shoulder. “Stop!”

Akechi stopped so suddenly that he almost overbalanced. “What?” he gasped, looking around, half expecting to be right at the edge of a busy intersection or inches away from trodding on a kitten. He wasn’t. His fellow students flowed around and past him, barely glancing back.

“Yusuke’s here,” Morgana said, nodding behind them.

Akechi turned. Yusuke waded through the throng, wincing, occasionally pausing to apologize when he nearly knocked someone over. Akechi always forgot how tall he was until moments like this, watching terrified freshmen scurry away like ants from an elephant.

Yusuke was panting when he reached them, and he had to double over with his hands on his knees for several seconds before he managed to speak. “You move,” he panted, “so quickly. I had. Forgotten.”

Depression was really something. Akechi was pretty sure he’d been going an inch an hour, but Yusuke was flushed and sweating. “I apologize,” Akechi said. “I was in my own little world.”

“That’s all right,” Yusuke said, straightening up at last. “You wouldn’t happen to have any water, would you?”

Akechi handed it over. Yusuke drained a third of the bottle and tried to give it back, but Akechi waved him off. “Keep it. So. Are you here to keep me company?”

“Along with Futaba,” Yusuke said, triumphantly holding up his phone, and then blinking at the blank screen. “Oh—it must have died—I lost my charger last week—”

Akechi’s phone started vibrating, and he took it out and accepted the video call. “Hello, Futaba,” he said. “How is Kyoto?”

“It’s good,” she said. She was crouched on her chair in what he recognized as her dorm room, her giant red headphones snug over her ears. Behind her, spinning idly in her own chair, was her roommate, Aiya. “Yusuke lost his charger again, huh?”

“Yes, I did,” Yusuke exclaimed, peering over Akechi’s shoulder. (His left shoulder, since Morgana was still perched on his right. They were getting some strange looks.) “However I’ve discovered that by turning my phone off every night, I can conserve the battery enough to—”

“Just buy another charger, Inari, I keep telling you they’re super cheap—”

“Shall we have this conversation elsewhere?” Akechi said. Bitter wind slammed into him, gnawing at his ears. “Inside, perhaps?”

“Oh!” Yusuke said. “Yes! We’re going to Leblanc.”

Akechi stiffened. Ran through the list of possible reasons. Came up with no good ones. “Ren isn’t working there today,” he said carefully.

“It’s not to see Ren,” Yusuke replied. “It’s for comfort. There’s nothing more comforting than good food and good company.”

“So the others will be there?”

“No, just us.”

A frog was climbing up Akechi’s throat with cold, prickling claws. Akechi shut his eyes, counted to ten, opened them. “Yusuke,” he said, focusing on the motion of his jaw, his tongue against his teeth. “Futaba. Morgana. I do not want to speak to Sojiro.”

“You don’t have to,” Futaba put in. “You know how he is, he barely ever talks—”

“I don’t know how much Ren has told you,” Akechi said, teeth grinding now, fingers aching around his phone, “but seeing Sojiro won’t—”

“Ren just said you were depressed,” Futaba said. She was staring out at him from behind her glasses, her eyes bright and keen and chillingly similar to Wakaba’s, to the way she’d looked at him when she’d tried to talk him out of killing her. Akechi’s stomach churned. “That’s all.”

“We don’t have to go to Leblanc,” Morgana said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Oh,” said Yusuke, “of course we don’t have to. I simply thought you’d enjoy it. It was my favorite place to be when I was at my lowest, so—”

Well, this was stupid. True to form, Akechi had overreacted, jumping straight from “let’s go to this café I like” to “I’m going to force you to talk to a man you wronged, and whose situation is very much like your mother’s.” If it was really an innocent choice, why not go? Leblanc was fine, even enjoyable, and Sojiro was indeed good, quiet company, so—why not?

“No, it’s all right,” Akechi said, even as chill water spread beneath his skin. “I haven’t been in a while. I’d like to go.”

“Are you _sure_?” Futaba said.

“We can go literally anywhere else,” Morgana said.

“Yes! Please do not feel obligated,” Yusuke said.

“I don’t,” Akechi said, squaring his shoulders. “Let’s go.”

Akechi spent the train ride, the walk from the station, and the instant after stepping into the cafe vibrating at a frequency undetectable by humans. But the moment Sojiro glanced up and said, “Oh, hey,” all of Akechi’s anxiety went out with the tide, leaving him bare and clean.

“Hello, Boss,” Yusuke said, perching on one of the barstools. “How are you?”

Sojiro waved this away like cigarette smoke. “Can’t complain.”

“Sojiroooo!” Futaba crowed from Akechi’s phone, suddenly significantly louder. “I hunger!”

“Can’t help you with that,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Did you eat all the meals I sent you already?”

She brightened, and hopped off her chair, and disappeared offscreen. “Nah, I’ve still got some!” she called, and there was a tremendous clatter. “Oops.”

“Hey, don’t break the fridge,” Aiya muttered, frowning into her textbook.

“Akechi,” Sojiro said, nodding at him as he took the stool beside Yusuke’s. “Ah, hey, don’t let the cat up here!”

Akechi caught Morgana around the middle and dropped him to the floor. “Apologies.”

“Hmph,” Morgana grumbled, slinking across to the booths. “S’not like my paws are dirty.”

“What’ll you have?” Sojiro asked.

“Curry, of course!” said Futaba, over the hum of a microwave.

“Definitely,” Yusuke said. “And some of your delicious coffee.”

“The Costa Rican SHB for me, please,” Akechi said. He didn’t even have to look at the menu. “Black.”

“Same for you?” Sojiro asked Yusuke.

“That sounds delightful,” Yusuke replied, like he knew what he was talking about.

Grunting, Sojiro got to work.

For the next couple of hours, Akechi thoroughly enjoyed himself. Futaba and Yusuke were a comedy unto themselves, and Morgana brightened once Akechi convinced Sojiro to give him a small portion of curry. The coffee was as good as ever; drinking Sojiro’s really highlighted how much more Ren had to learn. And Sojiro was fine, even friendly. He spent most of their visit watching TV, offering idle commentary on their conversation, or bustling around the tiny kitchen.

Once, Chuichi had asked Akechi why he assumed the worst in everyone. It had turned out to be a complex question, for all that Akechi tried to answer it simply. Even more complex was the follow-up: “Don’t you get tired, jumping at shadows all the time?”

He was tired. Not just from the depression, which lurked at the back of his mind even now. He was sick and tired of eyeing every person in his life, no matter how considerate, with the deep and abiding suspicion that had kept him alive as a child and led him almost to his death as a teenager. He was tired of fighting his brain for every inch of ground, tired of wrestling with the voice in his head that constantly whispered, _They don’t really like you. They don’t know you well enough yet. Just wait, and they’ll see_. _They’re just lulling you into a false sense of security. They’re just waiting for the chance to pull the rug out from under you! Run. Run NOW._

Akechi hadn’t run in years. He was pretty sure that he and Ren were stable, however often he woke up in a cold sweat thinking that Ren had finally packed his bags. But he was _convinced_ that everybody else was lying, or pretending, or barely tolerating him out of pity or politeness. How many times did he have to be proven wrong before he believed it? This week alone he’d been showered with affection and friendship and, call it what it was, _love_. He could claim they’d all done it for Ren, not for him, but it was him they’d had to spend time with, him they’d figured out how to entertain and distract. And Akihiko and Naoto hardly knew Ren; why would they do him that sort of favor?

No. People cared about him. He was tired of denying it, tired of denying himself good company and good food and good fucking coffee to satisfy the shrieking thirteen-year-old trapped in the back of his mind.

So when Sojiro called, “Akechi, hold up a minute,” as he, Morgana, and Yusuke hung up with Futaba and made their way out, Akechi allowed himself only a split second of panic before he turned around, letting the door swing shut behind his—behind his friends.

“Ren doesn’t have to be here for you to come by, you know,” Sojiro told him. Now Akechi understood why he hardly ever looked directly at anyone: the force of his stare was tectonic. “You’re always welcome.”

Akechi did his best to hold Sojiro’s gaze, but he couldn’t do it for long. Clearing his throat, he looked down and away, tugging at his gloves. “Thank you, Sakura-san.”

“Ehh, quit calling me that,” Sojiro said, with an audible wince. “Just call me Boss like the others. Or Sojiro.”

“Sojiro,” Akechi said, still tugging, wrinkling the leather. “All right.”

That was it. The conversation was over. He could leave. But his feet wouldn’t move. Something else was locked inside his chest, at the base of his throat, trying to get out.

“Somethin’ on your mind, kid?” Sojiro asked.

“I’m not a kid,” Akechi said automatically.

Sojiro chuckled. “Yeah, you are. You won’t realize it until you’re an old man like me, but you’re still just a kid.”

Twisting the glove between his fingertips, Akechi looked at a booth, at the wall, swept his gaze across the shop to the television. Someone in a red armchair was talking to someone else on a red couch. The volume was low, so he couldn’t hear their voices, but he watched the person in the armchair throw their head back and laugh at something the couch person had said.

“After I killed Wakaba,” he said, his mouth forming the words before he knew what was happening and continuing despite his dawning horror, “you quit your job, took Futaba, and came here. You knew what had happened to her mother. What I’d done.”

“What Shido did,” Sojiro said, a bearlike growl.

“What _my father_ did.” The person on the couch smiled and nodded at something the armchair person was saying, their hands clasped on their crossed knees. “You gave up your career, your life, possibly friends and family, to protect her. And yourself, I suppose; if Shido had suspected you knew what he’d done, he would have told me to kill you, too. You vanished.” Akechi swallowed, last chance, last chance to shut up and let it go, let the subject drop; but his tongue and teeth had other ideas. “Was it worth it?”

The silence couldn’t have lasted very long, or else Yusuke and Morgana would have come back to see what was wrong. But it felt long. It felt long, and cold, and desolate as an Arctic night, give or take a snarling polar bear.

A creak drew Akechi’s attention: Sojiro was sinking onto one of the stools, bracing his elbow on the bar, covering his face with his hand.

“Jesus,” he breathed, shaking his head. “What kind of a question is that?”

Akechi was cutting off his own circulation now, pinching his wrist inside the glove. “I apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t pry—”

“ _Pry_?” Sojiro said, dropping his hand, squinting at Akechi. “You’re not prying. It’s just—Christ. What kind of a question...”

A blush climbed Akechi’s neck, suffused his cheeks. “I—”

“Shido’s lucky he’s in the ground,” Sojiro muttered, and flapped his hand when Akechi started to speak. “Figure of speech, I know they cremated him. If I regret anything about running off, it’s that I didn’t tell anybody what I knew. I let him get away with murdering Wakaba, and with everything else. If I’d said something, maybe...”

Sojiro glared at the floor, scratched the back of his head, sighed.

“Sheesh. Who am I kidding? You all needed magic powers to stop him. Who was I to get involved?” His shoulders jerked as he scoffed. “The _least_ I could do was find Futaba and keep her safe. Was it worth it. Of course it was. I’d do it a hundred times over.”

Akechi’s fingers were going numb, so he let go of his glove, fisted his hands at his sides. “That’s good,” he said as the fog crept back in, coiling around his spine. “She’s fortunate to have you.”

“You should’ve had somebody too,” Sojiro said. Every word pierced like a dart, peppering Akechi’s ribs. “You shouldn’t’ve had to go it alone.”

“Yes,” Akechi said, turning around. “Well. I won’t keep you. Thank you for your time.”

And he left before Sojiro could say anything else.

***

That night, after dinner, Akechi lay down on the couch and slept. He no longer had the energy to be annoyed about this; he didn’t have a choice in the matter. His body compelled him to sleep, so he slept.

When he woke up, feeling no more rested, his mouth was dry and his shoulder hurt where he’d twisted it underneath himself. The lamp above him filled the room with golden light, which would have been pleasant if he wasn’t so tired. Other things that would have been pleasant: the blanket tucked snug over him; Morgana’s liquid warmth twined around his feet; the sight of Ren, earbuds in, with his tablet balanced on Akechi’s hip. Akechi was draped across Ren’s lap, his legs drawn up against Ren’s opposite side.

Akechi nudged Ren with his knee. “What are you watching?”

Ren tapped the screen, took his earbuds out. “Something stupid. I’m not that far in; I could start over if you wanted to watch it with me.”

“Not right now.”

Ren reached over and brushed Akechi’s bangs off his forehead, a gesture that reminded him so forcefully of his mother that his heart compressed. He grimaced, recoiled; but when Ren started to draw back, he caught his wrist and held it.

“Lay down with me.”

It took some maneuvering. The couch was _just_ wide enough for them to lie on their sides facing each other, legs tangled, Akechi’s arms folded across his chest and Ren’s wrapped around him. Morgana fussed at the disruption, waited for them both to settle down, and then resumed his position at their feet, purring.

Akechi closed his eyes again. He couldn’t help it.

“Gonna go back to sleep?” Ren murmured, stroking Akechi’s back.

Five minutes ago, he might have. But the memory of his mother’s face, of her fingertips on his forehead, had formed a thick, poisonous roux at the back of his throat. He couldn’t swallow it, so he tried to spit it out instead.

“Chuichi thinks,” he began. Ren’s fingers stilled, and then resumed, lightly tracing his shoulderblade. “Chuichi suggested...”

Where to start? It was so complicated. There was so much he’d told Chuichi that he’d never told Ren. How was he supposed to make Ren understand without explaining it all again?

Akechi cleared his throat. “He pointed out that it was strange, when you think about it, that Shido allowed me to be born. Allowed me to grow up free from his influence. Chuichi suggested that perhaps my mother’s situation—her choice of employment, the places we lived—was not just because my father slandered her, but also because...”

“Because she was protecting you,” Ren whispered.

Akechi glanced at him. Ren’s eyes were wide, his lips parted, but the high color flooding his cheeks ruled out shock or surprise. He looked... _awed_.

“Yes,” Akechi said. The stickiness had spread now, like molasses, like overworked caramel, to try to cement his teeth together. “As a sex worker, she could make a living without drawing attention or putting herself on the grid. And we moved often enough that if Shido ever got wind of us, we’d likely have left before he could act. He didn’t have that much influence when I was young, after all.”

Ren’s face softened. He cupped Akechi’s jaw, ran his thumb along Akechi’s cheekbone. “So you think it makes sense.”

Akechi coughed a laugh. “Makes _sense_? Hardly. It’s a reasonable enough conclusion. But the choice itself—to throw away her entire life over a child, who could never repay that sort of debt—is preposterous. I cannot understand it.”

“She must have loved you,” Ren breathed, “so much.”

Akechi squirmed. “For nothing. For _nothing_. She didn’t even know me. And once she did, I couldn’t return her love. All I was concerned with was—was what we didn’t have. What she couldn’t give me. I was ungrateful; I was—”

“A little kid who didn’t know the stakes.”

“Anyway, it certainly puts the end into perspective,” Akechi continued. “I would have killed myself too, if the child I’d sacrificed so much to raise couldn’t appreciate what he’d been given.”

The words had bubbled up from a wellspring deep inside of him, but by the time they reached his mouth, they felt—empty.

“Is that really what you think?” Ren asked quietly.

“No,” Akechi said, surprised. “No, I don’t.”

“Good. Because I don’t either.”

There was still so much that didn’t make sense. So many contradictions. _But, but, but. If, then. Why, why not._ Questions he’d never get real answers to, because the only person who could have answered them had been dead for thirteen years. If Chuichi could be believed, Akechi didn’t have to know. One way or another, he could— _would_ learn to live with that.

That didn’t sound so bad.

There was, however, one thing he needed to know for certain.

Akechi dropped his gaze to Ren’s throat, to the arch of his clavicle. Gently, he pressed his fingertips to it, into the hollow of his skin.

“Do you think it was worth it?” he asked softly.

He could feel Ren’s pulse beneath his fingers, Ren’s breath in his hair. “What do you mean?”

Akechi licked his lips with a fumbling tongue. “Suppose that Chuichi’s right. Suppose Aiku Akechi learned she was pregnant, told Shido, and something about his reaction implied that the child would not be allowed to live. Or that he would take it from her and raise it to be as much of a monster as he was.”

Ren’s hand closed over his, squeezing tight.

“So she ran, gave birth, hid him away as best she could. But she gave up her entire life to do so. Her reputation, her ambitions, her future—gone. Maybe she didn’t fully grasp the sacrifice she was making, but she still made it.”

Akechi was talking so fast that he kept tripping over himself, but he couldn’t slow down. If he stopped now, he’d never start again.

“Was it worth it?”

Ren opened his mouth, and Akechi added sharply, “And don’t say yes because you love me. Really think about this objectively.”

Ren closed his mouth again. After a moment, he drew Akechi closer, fisting his hand in the back of Akechi’s shirt.

“Objectively,” Ren muttered. “Hm.”

A shudder racked Akechi’s body, pulling his joints apart. “Hah,” he said, teeth clacking. “The fact that you’re hesitating is—”

“I’m not hesitating, I’m trying to—it’s a stupid question,” Ren said, and when Akechi lifted his head to glare at him, he found Ren glaring back. “ _Objectively_ , was it worth it for her to protect you? How am I supposed to answer that?”

“Simple,” Akechi retorted. “You tally up my failings and my accomplishments, and then—”

“But what do you consider a failing? What do you consider an accomplishment?”

“Oh, I have a great many failings. Where shall I start? Putting myself in the crosshairs of the very man she tried to protect me from, for one—”

“It’s not that simple,” Ren said. “You know it’s not.”

“There’s _nuance_ , certainly, there’s nuance to everything, but—”

“Do you think she sat down and wrote a pro-con list? Do you think she ran away from Shido thinking, ‘boy, I sure hope this kid is worth it?’”

“If she didn’t, she should have.”

“But then you wouldn’t _be here_ ,” Ren exclaimed, gripping the side of Akechi’s head, shaking him. “If she’d thought about it _objectively_ , she wouldn’t have had you, or she would have let Shido take you, or she—everything she did was subjective. You can’t judge her based on—”

“I’m not judging her, I’m judging myself! Did I live up to the expectation she set? And there _is_ an expectation. It’s naïve in the extreme to think that just because she loved me, she wouldn’t be disappointed by what I became.”

“And what did you become?” Ren demanded. “A detective? A hero?”

Akechi scoffed. “A _hero_. What are you—”

“Saving my life, that’s not heroic? Sacrificing yourself, that’s not heroic?”

“I wasn’t trying—”

Ren sat up, which would have dislodged Morgana, but Morgana had moved to the back of the couch and now glowered at Akechi over Ren’s shoulder. Grudgingly, Akechi sat up too.

“Goro,” Ren said. “That’s the _point_. Every time you had to make a hard choice, you made the right one. You were always thinking about the greater good, even if it meant hurting yourself.”

Akechi sneered. “The greater good. Familiar rhetoric.”

“Shido talked about it, but he didn’t _care_ about it,” Morgana growled, tail lashing. “He only cared about himself. You’re not like that.”

A flush climbed up Akechi’s neck. “When did this become about—”

“Isn’t that what all of this is about?” Ren asked. Akechi suddenly felt very raw beneath his gaze, like he was being peeled apart. “Whether or not you’re like him? Whether you take after him? _Think about it_. If we were talking about anybody else—”

“We’re not,” Akechi said, racing to shut Ren up, because whatever he was about to say was going to blast apart the foundation of Akechi’s life all over again. “We’re talking about me.”

But Ren barreled on. “If we were talking about anybody else,” he repeated, jabbing his finger into Akechi’s chest, “you’d agree with me. You’d lay out the facts, _objectively_ , and you’d say—”

“Stop.”

“—that this person was obviously nothing like his father, and how could he be? He only knew him for a few years, and hated everything he stood for.”

Akechi shot off the couch, but he couldn’t go far, magnetized by the iron glinting in Ren’s eyes as he, too, got to his feet.

“You’d say,” Ren continued, steady and true, “that all of the things he thought he inherited from his father weren’t his father’s at all.”

“Ren, I swear to God,” Akechi whispered, clenching his cold and shaking hands into fists.

“They were his mother’s.” The words lashed like a whip, cutting through flesh, through bone, into Akechi’s lungs and lodging in his heart. “Nature or nurture, they came from her.”

I really hate you sometimes, Akechi tried to say, but he couldn’t speak around the balloon expanding into his throat and cutting off his air. He squeezed his eyes shut, turned his face away.

And then Ren was gently grasping his shoulders, pressing in close, resting his forehead against Akechi’s temple.

“His tenacity,” Ren said, deep and warm and resonant inside Akechi’s skull. “His intelligence. His bravery. His ambition—not to get power for power’s sake, but to change things for the better. His sense of justice. His kindness.” Akechi laughed, high and skeptical, and Ren tightened his grip. “You are kind, Goro. You are. And generous, and thoughtful, and loving—”

I knew you’d read my list, Akechi wanted to say, but the bubble behind his sternum had burst and he was crying. His knees buckled. Ren caught him, guided him to the floor, put both arms around him and rocked him gently from side to side, still murmuring praise in his ear. Presently Morgana joined them, leaning against Akechi’s lower back, curling his tail around his ribs.

It seemed like hours before Akechi stopped sobbing. His nose was hopelessly clogged; his hair was stuck to his wet cheeks and damp forehead; his chest ached with exertion. Ren had long since run out of adjectives and was combing his fingers through Akechi’s hair, shushing him, occasionally saying, “I love you, Goro, I love you.”

“God damn you,” Akechi croaked when he finally found his voice.

Ren snorted. “You love me too.”

Instead of answering, Akechi buried his face in Ren’s shoulder and clutched him.

“It was worth it,” Ren said, kissing Akechi’s temple. “She wanted you to live and you lived, so it was worth it.”

“And there’s tons of people who’re happier because you’re around,” Morgana piped up, bumping Akechi’s elbow. “Like me, and Haru, and Ann, and Sumire, and Yusuke, and Yu and Yosuke and Naoto and Aigis and Akihiko—”

“Why are you _determined_ to make me cry,” Akechi snapped.

“Crying clears your skin and waters your crops,” Morgana said. “That’s what Futaba always says.”

“Futaba is an internet goblin.”

Ren laughed. “Can I say one more thing that might make you cry?”

Akechi heaved a sigh. “Fine.”

Ren jostled his shoulder so that Akechi lifted his head, cupped Akechi’s face, looked at him. “She must have been amazing,” he said, stark and serious. “To do what she did. To protect you. You were so lucky to have her.”

Akechi stared back at him, waiting: for his heart to clench like a fist, for tears to scald his skin, for spiteful venom to pool under his tongue. But to his utter, jaw-slackening shock, none of those things happened. Instead, he was suffused with a warmth, from the crown of his head to the pads of his feet, that swept all of the tension from his limbs.

It left behind a single, solitary thought, bright as the sun cresting the horizon: _Yes, exactly_.

It left behind _relief_.

“She was an incredible person,” Akechi said. “One of the best.”


	5. you are so much more than the wars you’ve won

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **cw:** depression

[CHATLOG. Futaba to Ren and Akechi, 12/17/XX, 12:00PM]

 **Futaba** OKAY. SO.  
**Futaba** I have a check for you  
**Futaba** For 4.5 million yen  
**Futaba** Actually it’s a money order, I guess that’s what you need to make big payments like this  
**Futaba** Sorry we cut it so close, it took a minute for the site to ~release the funds~

 **Ren** ???  
**Ren** What are you talking about?

 **Futaba** If they won’t take it or whatever just tell me and I’ll figure out how wiring cash works  
**Futaba** Oh!  
**Futaba** >:3  
**Futaba** We raised all the money you need and then some  
**Futaba** Everybody was super generous  
**Futaba** And idk maybe they’ll charge you tax or something, who knows  
**Futaba** Anyway it’s done

 **Ren** Raised the money or “raised” the money?

 **Futaba** Hey!! These paws are clean!  
**Futaba** I set up a help.me and sent it to everyone  
**Futaba** help.me/fuck-the-govt-persona-style  
**Futaba** Ignore the name I know it’s dumb  
**Futaba** It’s private, you can only see it with the link, so don’t worry about any plebes finding out  
**Futaba** (I made SURE nobody else could find out)

 **Ren** Futaba.  
**Ren** This is incredible.  
**Ren** We don’t need all of this.

 **Futaba** Donate it or sth then idc  
**Futaba** The point IS, now Akechi can get out from under  
**Futaba** Speaking of which HI AKECHI, I SEE YOU LEAVING ME ON READ  
**Futaba** EVERYBODY SAYS YOU’RE WELCOME

[CHATLOG. Akechi to Aigis, Akihiko, and 22 others..., 12/17/XX, 12:12PM]

 **Akechi** Thank you all so much.

***

“I just don’t understand,” Akechi murmured, for the umpteenth time.

He was sitting at his desk, scrolling down the fundraising page. All of the donation amounts were hidden, but everyone was present and accounted for, even people he’d never have expected. Mitsuru Kirijo. Junpei Iori. Fuuka Yamagishi. Yukiko Amagi. Rise Kujikawa. _Teddie_ , who had probably contributed 500 yen, but who had _contributed_ , when he and Akechi had literally never spoken to each other. People in the Persona orbit, but who Akechi didn’t count as friends or even allies, really. People who’d been wildly, absurdly generous, to raise that much money in such a short time. Akechi suspected Mitsuru, Haru, and Rise had a lot to do with it.

Ren, standing behind Akechi with his arms around Akechi’s shoulders, smiled against his cheek. “I can’t believe they did this.”

“It was pretty tough to organize,” said Morgana loftily, flopping his tail across Akechi’s wrist. “Lots of secret meetings. D’you know how hard it’s been to sneak out of here lately?”

“But _why_?” Akechi asked. “Why would they—half of them don’t even know me—”

“We take care of our own,” Morgana said.

Akechi’s nostrils burned, his throat closed, and he put his head down and wept. He’d done a lot of crying in the past twelve hours, so he was resigned to it now; certainly he couldn’t muster the will to fight it anymore. Ren shifted his arms to Akechi’s waist, his heartbeat steady against Akechi’s spine, his lips tender on Akechi’s neck.

“I don’t deserve this,” Akechi croaked. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I _don’t_. I’ve never—done anything to—”

Ren brushed Akechi’s hair from his damp face and kissed his temple, his cheek, all along his jaw to his ear. Akechi bit back a sob.

“You want to know the secret, Goro?” Ren asked, so close that his breath tickled Akechi’s earlobe. “You deserve it. You’ve always deserved it. Now you get to prove it.”

Akechi started to lift his head, started to snap, _That doesn’t make any sense_ , and paused. The gears were turning in his brain.

Prove it. Prove that he was worth saving, worth loving, worth protecting. Prove that he was more than a scared, selfish child, more than a drain on his mother’s soul, more than his father’s son. More than what the world expected him to be.

Meeting, exceeding, defying expectations—he’d been doing that his whole life.

He’d do it again.

Akechi sat up, turned around, registered the challenging gleam in Ren’s eye and the bladed edge of his smirk. _Prove them wrong_ , it said. _Prove me right._

“Aw man,” Morgana groaned. “At least gimme a minute to get out of here before—”

“I have class,” Akechi murmured, sitting perfectly still as Ren leaned in.

“Not today,” Ren said, and kissed him.

***

“Okay,” Aiku said, adjusting her gloves. “What are the rules?”

She was standing by the door, her hair gathered into a neat chignon, her cheeks dusted with blush and her lips with rouge. Over her shoulders was the tan A-line coat that she loved so much, fastened with thick black buttons; underneath that, paired with black stockings, was a red knee-length dress. It was one of her trademark outfits: she often bustled around their apartment in it, checking her makeup, adjusting her earrings, hopping on one foot to slip on this or that pair of low, comfortable heels.

It was one of the last good nights. But Goro didn’t know that yet.

“Don’t answer the phone,” he recited without looking up from his book. “Don’t answer the door. Don’t go outside. Make sure everything’s locked. Brush my teeth and be in bed by 9.”

Smiling, she crossed the room and bent to kiss the top of his head. “Exactly,” she said, smoothing his hair back, tucking it behind his ear. Goro flinched away, ticklish. “Hmm. I might need to cut your hair soon. It’s getting pretty long.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Goro snapped, shrugging her off. “I’m _reading_.”

“Okay, okay. Good night.”

“Night,” he muttered.

Goro heard her shoes clacking, the door closing, the heavy _clunk_ of the deadbolt sliding home.

He couldn’t remember the book now. More curiously, he couldn’t remember her perfume. She’d almost certainly been wearing some; she typically had; and wasn’t smell supposed to be the strongest sense memory? But that night, nothing. It was strange.

Thinking about it, he was pretty sure she’d been a professional escort then, wining and dining (and sleeping) with Tokyo’s great and powerful. Not necessarily a bad job, albeit an unorthodox one. What had triggered her downward spiral? Had she overheard something, seen something, that upset her? Had something happened to her? Had someone _done something_ to her?

“Akechi?” said Chuichi.

Akechi blinked back to himself, sitting in Chuichi’s office, hands folded in his lap.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “You asked me something.”

Chuichi smiled. “I did. What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.” Akechi shifted, pinched the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. “My mother. But it’s not something we have to talk about today.”

“We can talk about whatever you’d like.”

“No. I don’t think I’m ready for that conversation yet. What did you ask me?”

“How you feel,” Chuichi repeated, patiently, “about Ren’s assessment of Aiku.”

Akechi stared at his hands, turning them over, wondering. There was so much about her that he’d never committed to memory. Her voice. Her face, beyond a blurry facsimile of his own. Her wrists and hands and fingers. He could recall so many occasions that she’d played or fussed with his hair, her fingertips and palms inches from his face, and yet he couldn’t remember what they looked like. Had he inherited them? That peculiar swirl on the pad of his ring finger, was that hers? Had—

“Akechi.”

“I’m sorry,” Akechi repeated, head snapping up. “How do I feel. He’s right. She was. Exceptional.” Slowly, inexorably, he looked down again, at the veins crisscrossing the back of his hands. At the tiny freckle at the base of his left index finger. At its mirror image, smaller still, on his right one. “I’m glad—someone else—knows it now. For so long, she was—only in my head.” A ghost. Intangible. Almost, almost forgettable. “And now Ren...I’m glad he knows.”

Goro was glad it was _him_.

“And do you agree that the qualities you thought you admired in Shido actually belonged to Aiku?”

“Yes. It seems so obvious now.” Goro huffed a laugh. “But then, it always does, with Ren.”

Chuichi tilted his head. “Does that explain why you want the cremains?”

“I don’t want them,” Goro said at once, surprised by his conviction. “I don’t want to _keep_ them. I’m…going to give them to Yusuke, and then…I don’t know. I’ll figure it out from there.”

A long, comfortable silence, in which Goro’s mind was cool and hushed as an old bookshop.

“How have your symptoms been treating you?”

“Hm?” Akechi frowned at Chuichi. “Symptoms?”

“Of the depressive episode you’re currently experiencing,” said Chuichi gently.

Symptoms. How were his symptoms? Better, sometimes. Mostly. It was difficult to say.

“I should start tracking them, I think,” Akechi murmured. “I can’t recall.”

“That’s a good idea. Let that be your homework this week. That, and: consider whether or not you’d be opposed to antidepressants.”

Akechi dutifully assigned himself the tasks, put away his notebook, stood up. “Thank you,” he told Chuichi. “I’ll see you next Friday.”

***

Monday morning, Akechi woke with the sunrise.

Which wasn’t saying much, considering the season: the sun rose later and later every day. Still, he preceded Morgana, who meowed irritably as Akechi clambered out of bed; and Ren, who didn’t even stir, lying on his side with drool puddling his pillow. It rather ruined the moment. Akechi could appreciate watching Ren sleep, but not when he was doing that.

Akechi’s brain was astonishingly well-behaved. His thoughts arranged themselves in neat, orderly lines, carrying him through his morning routine. Brush teeth, shower, comb hair, style hair, moisturize. Hand the bathroom over to Ren, accepting the customary cup of coffee on the way. Unhook his clothes from where he’d hung them in the bedroom the night before and put them on: khakis, white button-up shirt with the collar undone, pale blue sweater vest. He’d often been told he dressed like an old man, but he liked it. People looked at him differently.

Ren heated up leftovers for them—beef bowls again; they were really straining their budget; although now, he supposed, they had money to spare—and they ate on the couch and Morgana on the desk. They were quiet, but not tense. Akechi had nothing to say, and Ren had always been good with silence. Better than Akechi, certainly.

The first thing Ren said out loud that morning, turning from the sink with his expression carefully neutral, was, “Ready?”

“Let’s get this over with,” Akechi replied.

They remained quiet on the way to the station; on the train, Akechi once again in a seat while Ren stood over him; and walking through Chiyoda-ku, toward Kasumigaseki, with their arms linked.

Akechi had been instructed to visit the police headquarters to pick up the cremains. From what he knew of the Correction Bureau, it was very much in character for them to offload such tasks onto police districts, especially Tokyo’s Metropolitan. More than once, Akechi had overheard cops complaining that they had to clean up the Bureau’s messes. Presumably they weren’t personally handing out the remains of the Bureau’s murdered inmates, but they no doubt bitched about it anyway, just for something to do.

They were two blocks away, the stark, angular white building just beginning to loom large ahead, when the clanging alarm in Akechi’s brain finally broke the surface.

He stopped walking. Ren didn’t notice until their arms jerked apart; he stumbled, looked back, blinked. “Akechi?”

“You can’t be here,” Akechi gasped, staring at him.

“What?”

“ _Ren_. You can’t _be here_.” As ever, anger was easier to bear than guilt and fear, so Akechi welcomed it, let it straighten his back and clench his fists. “What makes you think you can walk into that building unmolested?”

Ren’s eyebrows, barely visible at the best of times, disappeared completely behind his hair. “What’re they gonna do to me?”

“Whatever they want! They’re cops. They don’t need an excuse.”

“They need a reason, though.”

“ _You’re a reason_. You look like a delinquent; anyone would be suspicious of you.” Ren put his hand to his chest, theatrically insulted. “And your face is probably all over their break room, riddled with darts—”

“You think cops play darts on their lunch hour?”

“You stay here,” Akechi said, brushing past. “I’ll be back in—”

But Ren fell into step beside him. Akechi stopped again. “Ren!”

“I’m not scared of them,” Ren said. “They can’t touch me.” Akechi bristled, but Ren cut him off: “Besides, nobody’ll recognize me. They brought me in the back door, last time.”

And just like that, Akechi understood.

“You don’t think,” he said, low and resolute, “that it’ll upset you, to go back in there?”

Ren stood very still, not quite looking at him.

“I told you,” Ren muttered. “They brought me in the back. It won’t—”

“But Sae took you out the front,” Akechi said, “right? Easier that way? Safer that way?”

Ren put his hands in his pockets, rocked his hips to one side, said nothing. His expression was perfectly calm and clear, ice across a pond.

“I can’t believe I didn’t realize,” Akechi said, rubbing his face. “I can’t believe I almost let you—”

“It’s not about me. You asked me to come—”

“You offered.”

“ _You asked_. And I want to be here for you, for this—”

“What are you trying to prove?” Akechi demanded, lifting his head, glaring at him. Ren glared back. “Who are you trying to prove it to?”

“Nothing,” Ren said. “No one.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious. That night, what happened, it was never about this place or these people,” Ren said, motioning at the forbidding silhouette behind them. “They brought me in through some secret tunnel, and when Sae took me out I wasn’t—” He broke off, and Akechi would spend a long time afterward wondering what he’d been about to say. _Conscious? Coherent? Alive?_ “The guys who interrogated me—” Tortured him, drugged him—“weren’t even cops. There’s no _reason_ for being here to bother me.”

“But it does,” Akechi said.

Ren dropped his hand to his side, clenched it into a fist, consciously released it. “It doesn’t.”

“It does.”

Ren looked away, eyebrows furrowed, a muscle flickering in his jaw. He so rarely expressed this kind of high emotion—and for him, this was practically a breakdown—that Akechi had only a vague idea what to do. Touching him wasn’t always appreciated, so Akechi did it carefully, choreographing his movements such that Ren would have plenty of time to stop him if he wanted to.

He didn’t, so Akechi rested one hand against his cheek, grasped his elbow with the other.

“I’ll go in and get the damn thing,” Akechi said quietly, “and you’ll be here when I come out, and we’ll take it to Yusuke together.”

Ren’s shoulders rose and fell with his breath, shuddering on the exhale. “I really wanted—”

“You’re here,” Akechi said. “I asked you to come, and you’re here.”

Ren shut his eyes. Akechi swayed forward, bumping their foreheads together, and closed his too.

Akechi knew why Ren was always so determined to keep a cool head. He hated being vulnerable perhaps more than Akechi did, and being emotional went hand-in-hand with being vulnerable. The difference was, Ren got really, truly emotional maybe once a year, whereas Akechi was constantly flying off the handle. (Well—maybe not _constantly_ , anymore.) It was…refreshing, comforting, _nice_ to be the one giving the support for a change, rather than taking, taking, taking.

Ren had carried Goro through some of the darkest moments of his life. Goro had been responsible for many of Ren’s. He owed it to him to help him when he could. When Ren let him.

“Come on,” Akechi said at last, taking Ren’s hand. “Wait outside for me.”

At the door, Ren squeezed Akechi’s hand maybe too tightly before they parted ways. Nobody glanced twice at Akechi as he strode across the lobby to the reception desk, where he was directed to another floor, and from there to yet another floor, and finally into a small, dingy room full of grim little cubicles. A man there squinted at Akechi, rummaged in a filing cabinet, and produced a rectangular plastic container.

“Shido, you said?” said the man, peering at a sticker pasted to the side of the container. “Okay.”

Flumping back into his chair, the man clattered at his keyboard for so long that Akechi had to bite his tongue to keep from asking what was wrong. Then, with a final grunt, the man printed out a piece of paper and slapped it down in front of Akechi. “Sign there.”

Akechi hesitated, and the man added, almost sneering, “It’s just to show that you’re the one who picked it up.”

Akechi didn’t dignify that with a response. He signed, and accepted the container, and resisted the urge to look at it or think about it right then. He let his feet pilot him back out of the office, down the elevator, out into chilly air that crystallized in his lungs and his throat.

Ren, leaning against a lightpost by the curb, waved. Akechi strode toward him, focusing on his faint smile, his gleaming eyes, his scarf and coat and slightly oversized pants, baggy around the ankles. (Akechi kept meaning to haul him into a real store and get his clothes properly tailored.)

(Akechi was thinking about this to distract himself from his feelings. Which was, he supposed, better than yelling at people.)

“Success,” Ren said, straightening up. He tilted his head, peering at the white container, long as Akechi’s forearm. “Huh. I was expecting something…fancier.”

“It’s light,” Akechi said, turning it over in his hands. Inside, something whispered like cascading sand, _shhhhh_. “Lighter than I expected.”

“It’s just ashes.”

“Ashes of an entire grown man. I'd thought it would weigh more.”

He’d never held an urn before, after all. Aiku’s ashes had not been offered to him. He still didn’t know where they’d gone.

Ren held out his hands. Akechi passed the container to him, folded his arms across his own chest.

Ren turned the urn—if it could really be called that—over, studying the corners, the plastic seam, the flimsy lid. It would have been easy, Akechi thought, to break it, or to drop it and pop it open and let Shido’s dust and bones fly everywhere.

Suddenly Ren smiled. “God, he’d hate this.”

“Hm?”

“Knowing that I was holding his remains,” Ren said, smile widening into a grin, balancing the container in his palm. “ _Me_ , the lousy teenager whose name he didn’t even remember. I told you I saw him at that buffet, right? No reaction. Nothing. He blew a huge hole in my life and didn’t even care.”

It was the most Akechi had heard Ren say about his father in a long time. Possibly ever. He didn’t dare interrupt.

“When we fought his Shadow,” Ren added, “I took off my mask so he could see my face. He looked at me like I was nobody. He didn’t recognize me as the leader of the Phantom Thieves _or_ as the kid he’d ruined in Inaba. We had to explain it to him. So then his Shadow knew, but his real self never did. People don’t remember what their Shadows experience.”

He turned the box this way and that, studying it like a gem extracted from a treasure chest, a bauble discovered in some forgotten corner of Mementos.

“Morgana doesn’t get enough credit for the name,” Ren murmured. “ _Phantom Thieves_. Yeah. Because even when we fought their Shadows, they never had a clue.”

“You’re right,” Akechi said. “He would hate it.”

Shido would have hated everything about this. His entire life, his whole being, reduced to two kilos of dust and bone shards, dumped into a nondescript plastic container and stuffed in a drawer for a month. Retrieved by his bastard son, who’d never respected him, never admired him, never rehabilitated his image to the public he’d disdained so much. Handed to his bastard son’s boyfriend, the scrawny kid who had bested him at every turn; who now mocked his memory, turning his son farther and farther away from him with every word.

To say nothing of the fact that Akechi, _his son_ , had allowed the architect of his destruction not just into his home, but into his _bed_. He would have been horrified to know what the hands currently clutching his urn had done to Akechi’s body.

To say nothing of the fact that Akechi wasn’t his father’s son.

He was his mother’s.

“D’you think they burned those ugly-ass glasses too?” Ren asked.

Akechi burst out laughing.

“I hope so,” he snickered, wiping his eyes. “He never wanted to be apart from them, after all.”

“He would’ve wanted those things baked into his monument. You know, the monument he definitely would’ve had, if not for us meddling kids.”

Akechi thought he heard a faint _ting_ , a pin dropping into place. “If not for you meddling kids, everyone in Japan would be mourning him right now. Probably wearing the same terrible glasses, in honor of the much-lamented Prime Minister.”

Ren’s smile was downright cruel. “Sobbing gently into handkerchiefs, fogging up the lenses.”

“Stumbling in front of cars, racked by grief.”

“What a loser,” Ren said, with relish.

He was. He _really was_.

Later, Chuichi would name the emotion that settled damp and cold in Akechi’s chest at that moment. It was entirely foreign, squeezing into his ribcage, compressing his heart, not exactly shame and certainly not sorrow.

“Pity?” Chuichi would say, and Akechi would sit up straight, furious at the suggestion and ashamed by how deeply it resonated. How could he pity Shido, of all people? Think about what he’d done! Why would Akechi give him something as kind and thoughtful as—

But pity did not feel kind or thoughtful. All his life, Akechi had abhorred the thought of being pitied, and now he knew he had good reason. You didn’t pity someone because you cared about them or ached for them or wished things had been different. That was sympathy; that was love. You pitied them because you could see the bars on the cage of their own making, and knew there was no way out, and knew they deserved to be there.

Shido had scorched the earth behind him, and eventually the flames had caught up.

(Later still, Akechi would go home and kiss Ren senseless and ask him, “Did you ever pity me?” And Ren would stare back at him, beautiful and brilliant, and say, “No.” And Akechi would believe him.)

In the here and now, Akechi snapped back to himself when Ren said, “Should we look?”

He had put his hand on the lid, and now he lifted his gaze to Akechi’s and waited. His eyes were dark, probing. Akechi paused.

“Won’t it all,” Akechi said, motioning vaguely.

“It’ll be in a bag.”

“How do you know?”

“I have some experience with urns.”

A story for another time. Tilting his head, Akechi considered the container, the seam around the upper edge, Ren’s white fingertips on the corners.

“Go on, then,” he said.

With a _pop_ , Ren removed the lid and tucked it under his arm. Then he reached into the container, grasped something, and took out—yes—a zip-locked plastic bag full of brownish-grey stuff. It looked nothing like the ashes left behind by wood. It was more like dust, or dirt, shot through with innumerable white flecks like gravel.

The bones had to be ground separately, Akechi knew. Your flesh and blood melted away and left the bare skeleton behind, which was then crushed into pieces. Traditionally, your family would return the bones to the ash, stacking you right-side-up inside your urn so you would be whole and complete in the afterlife. No such kindness due to Shido.

Ren studied the cremains, turning them over, squeezing them. “It feels like a Will Seed,” he said. “Papery.”

He looked at Akechi again.

Akechi reached out, and Ren set the bag in his hands.

 _Papery_ was a good word. The bag rustled as Akechi lifted it to eye level and surveyed its contents. Layer upon layer of gray sediment; jagged bits of bone that prodded his fingers through the plastic; here and there something almost recognizable, a broken tooth or fragmented phalange. Somehow even lighter without the container surrounding it. Light enough to blow away in the wind, to drift out to sea, to fly Akechi’s life and his mind.

Shido had thought he was bigger than the world, and now here he was, dust in a Ziploc.

About to be something else.

“Let’s go see Yusuke,” Akechi said.

***

Yusuke had asked them to meet him at his campus studio, a low, long concrete building that looked like nothing so much as a warehouse. Inside were a series of private workrooms, each assigned to one of the students in Yusuke’s program; along with a common area packed with devices and equipment that Akechi couldn’t have identified even after listening to Yusuke wax rhapsodic about them for going on three years.

It was barely nine in the morning, but Yusuke had already managed to cover himself in charcoal before he came out to meet them. Black smears stained his hands, one sleeve, and the front of his shirt, which was additionally damp with something that smelled like ammonia but probably wasn’t, probably.

“ _Ah_ ,” Yusuke said, like a sigh, at the sight of the container under Akechi’s arm. “There it is.”

“Here it is,” Akechi confirmed, holding it out.

Yusuke started to reach for it and seemed, for the first time, to notice his dirty fingers. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I should wash my hands—”

“No you shouldn’t,” Akechi said. “It’s trash. Just take it.”

But when Yusuke finally grasped it, gentle, reverent, Akechi didn’t let go.

“I want you to use them,” Akechi told him, looking him straight in the eye. Yusuke blinked. “In your art, in a project, whatever. However you think is best. All I ask is: make something transient. A statue that’ll fall apart in the rain. A painting that’ll collapse under its own weight. Nothing ideal, nothing beautiful. I want it to be broken and ugly. Do you understand?”

Moments like this, Akechi could see why Yusuke and Ren were friends. When they looked at him like that, determined and absolute, they were lit with the same fire. “I understand.”

Akechi let go, finally, finally, and lowered his hands to his sides. Yusuke tucked the container into his elbow, leaving gray smudges on the white plastic.

“I’ll let you know what I—”

“No,” said Akechi. “Not that either. As far as I’m concerned, after I leave here today, they’re gone. I never want to think about them again.”

Yusuke glanced, for the first time, at Ren, solid and warm at Akechi’s shoulder. Ren tipped his chin slightly downward.

“All right,” Yusuke said. He bowed, a shallow incline, his hair falling forward to frame his face. “I won’t let you down.”

***

And he didn’t.

At the end of every semester, Yusuke’s program hosted an art show featuring the students’ final projects. It was always held in a huge, airy building: white walls studded with floor-to-ceiling windows that spilled bluish light onto the surrounding pavement. The night was cold, turning Ren’s breath to fog, but he didn’t feel it, surrounded as he was by his friends: Futaba teasing Morgana, who was peeking out of Ren’s bag; Makoto and Ryuji comparing notes about their latest gacha game obsession; Haru, Sumire, and Ann trading war stories.

The only one absent was Akechi. When Ren had left him, he’d been video chatting with Naoto Shirogane, as relaxed as he could be considering what Ren and the others were about to see. Akechi was adamant, still, that he didn’t want to be there, so Ren had kissed him goodbye and left him in Naoto’s capable hands.

Entering the gallery was, as always, like entering a cathedral. Recessed white lights illuminated various pieces along the walls and throughout the room, but the walkways were dim and crowded with hulking shadows that resolved themselves into men and women. The only sounds were the dissonant drone of music—this time provided by a hurdy-gurdy player in the far corner—and the hushed voices of the crowd, muttering about the artwork on display. The artists themselves, positioned stoically beside their works, were forbidden from interacting with the guests beyond greetings and farewells, no matter what they overheard.

“Food!” Ryuji said, pointing at the long table immediately to their right. “Aw shit, is that sushi? They really went all out this time!”

“Don’t say _shit_ ,” Ann hissed.

“I want sushi!” Morgana exclaimed.

Futaba shoved him deeper into Ren’s bag. “Quiet, cat!”

“Let’s find Yusuke first, and eat later,” Makoto said. “Does anyone see him?”

Ren did. Yusuke’s display was in the middle of the room, and the man himself alongside it, staring into space with his hands behind his back. Nodding toward him, Ren led the way, weaving easily between the shuffling passersby.

Four works were featured in Yusuke’s section: a watercolor, a charcoal drawing, a vase, and something obscured by a minor crowd. At the front of the pack were two men. One was a stooped, balding gentleman with jowls for days; the other was taller, apparently younger, with an arrogant tilt to his jaw that Ren disliked even at this distance. They were arguing: the younger man kept flicking his hand like he was batting away the older man’s points. The rest of the spectators swiveled their heads in unison from one man to the other, mesmerized.

As the Thieves neared Yusuke, he brightened; and presently Ren could hear what the arguing men were saying.

“It must be intentional,” said the older man. “Kitagawa-kun is much too skilled to make such an egregious mistake.”

“Glass is a difficult medium,” the younger man said. “One cannot be good at everything.”

“But look at the quality of the craftsmanship. The detail—”

“Oh, certainly it _could_ have been a beautiful piece. The fact remains that it isn’t.”

“Because, I tell you, he did not wish it to be. The title is _hubris_ ; that would naturally suggest something ugly.”

“Hello, everyone,” Yusuke said, smiling at the Thieves. “Welcome.”

“Hey dude,” Ryuji said, clapping him on the back. Yusuke winced. “Lookin’ good.”

“Is that,” Sumire said, motioning at whatever the men were bickering over. Yusuke nodded.

“The flaw is obvious, if you ask me,” said the younger man, in a ringing voice that made Yusuke’s nostrils flare. (“ _Flaw_!” the older man scoffed.) “He didn’t use enough stabilizer.” Turning, the younger man addressed his audience: “See the crizzling? The moisture on the surface? This is sick glass.”

“Yes indeed,” said the older man, wagging a finger. “As it’s meant to be.”

“Excuse me,” Haru said. “May we—”

But Ren didn’t wait for permission. He lifted his head, straightened his shoulders, and stepped forward. The crowd parted for him, several people stumbling sideways as though they’d only just noticed him standing there. (That was how he liked it.)

Underneath a spotlight, atop a pedestal, was a lion. Its head was proudly upraised, magnificent face turned as if to survey something in the distance; its left forepaw was curled, its shoulders and hips rocked forward, its tail arched regally over its broad back. The old man had been right about the details: it was beautifully realistic, all muscled flesh and dense paws and feathered mane. Even its whiskers, fine and slender as spun sugar, looked real enough to twitch.

It was cast entirely out of orange glass, the same color that Shido’s glasses had been. But the younger man had been right to call it _sick_. Under the glare of the spotlight, its surface glittered with condensation that trickled down its sides and legs and pooled beneath its feet. Clouds of fog seemed to whorl within its round belly and boxy muzzle; delicate fractures spidered all across its head, its mane, its back and limbs. What had the younger man called that? _Crizzling_? That sounded right, too. Overall it looked like it would shatter under the slightest pressure; like if Ren planted his palm on it and pushed, it would crumble into the sand and ash from which it was made.

“Holy shit, Yusuke,” Ann breathed.

Ryuji whistled. Futaba, beaming, punched Yusuke’s shoulder.

Sumire read the placard, written in English: “ _Hu-bris_.”

“Pride,” Makoto supplied, softly.

“I want it,” Haru said. They all looked around at her, Ren raising his eyebrows, everyone else blinking or gaping. “I want to buy it from you. How much?”

Yusuke closed his mouth. “Er—”

Haru spun toward him, lips trembling, eyes overbright. “How _much_?”

“What’re you gonna do with it?” Ryuji asked.

He flinched when she leveled her gaze at him, twisting her fingers tight into her sweater. She said, “I’m going to put it in the nastiest, dirtiest, most desolate corner of my garden, where the rain falls the hardest.”

“Actually,” said the younger man, behind them, “water is very bad for—”

“Be quiet, you silly little man,” Haru snapped over her shoulder. The younger man blushed; the older man chuckled. “Yusuke?”

“I,” Yusuke said. His cheeks were pink. “Well. I hadn’t. Given it any thought.”

Smiling, Ren turned back to the rotting statue. Morgana, surreptitiously poking out his nose, said, “It’s really good, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna take a picture?”

Ren did. And then, after a moment’s thought, he opened his chat app.

[CHATLOG. Ren to Akechi, 1/22/XX, 8:07PM]

 **Ren** Are you sure you don’t want to see it?

_.  
.  
_ _._  
_.  
_ _._

**Akechi** All right, then.

Ren could picture him sitting at his desk, pen in one hand, chin resting on the other, backlit by the lamp on their side table. Could picture him setting down the pen, picking up his phone, angling the screen to see better.

Smiling, maybe.

[CHATLOG. Akechi to Ren, 1/22/XX, 8:16PM]

 **Akechi** It’s perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the song was [heirloom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auOivVnhI00).
> 
> thanks for reading.


End file.
